What does the film say about the effect of the internet and how we create identity and relationships online?

After watching Catfish, which is a film about this man who is being filmed by two filmmakers as he becomes involved in a relationship with a woman online, I feel that you cannot trust anyone online and people sometimes might not be who we think they are. 

In the documentary you see the man build a relationship with a young woman on the social networking site Facebook.  Before he meets this woman online he meets numerous other members of this young woman’s family – all online on Facebook.  This man is lead into believing that all these family members are real although he doesn’t know or realise that it is one woman controlling all accounts. 

This films shows that the internet can exploit the genuine users of the web and online social networking sites.  This film also acts as a healthy reminder that we live in a digital age and that we can make all the digital contact with a person that we want but it doesn’t trump having personal face-to-face relationships.

The man featured in the film was made to look a fool – even he admitted it.  He believed that he was actually speaking to the people who appeared in the pictures on their Facebook pages and had their own lives with their own views and opinions and hobbies.

He developed a romantic relationship with one ‘woman’ who he thought was a pretty young model who was a singer and a dancer who was the daughter of Angela – but in the end it was the woman who acted as their mother who was controlling all accounts that Nev communicated with.  Nev and the so called ‘Megan’ communicate via text message, online chat and through phone calls, yet all Nev knows about ‘Megan’ is what he’s gathered from her Facebook profile page.  It seems as though he is in love with an online profile and not an actual person.  This shows that people can easily be someone who they aren’t.  People can create an account with a totally different identity to who they are.  They can put a picture up of anyone they can find online and people will believe it is them – I think this is because of the digital age we live in and people don’t take into account the risks they take when they are online and what they can get into when communicating with a stranger over the net.

Overall I feel the films theme, the influence and strong foothold of the Internet, is apparent throughout although we do not realise this until towards the end when all is revealed.  This film, through an online bond, shows how today digital age society shifts away from human interaction into an age of artificial relationships based on unstable foundations and naivety.