Tuesday, May 3, 2011

Catfish

Due Tues. a blog posting giving your analysis of "catfish" how does it fit in to our larger discussions of democratized media and web 2.0?

In class we've discussed how web 2.0 is a socialized form of web 1.0. The static consistency of web 1.0 is a very clear depiction of news and information one is supposed to see by professional reporters. Web 2.0 is more user generated information which we have discussed has much controversy over its legitimacy and credibility. Catfish is a perfect example of web 2.0 generated information that lacks credibility and borderline is illegal due to identity privacy.

In Catfish a woman portrays at least 15 other people on Facebook, a social media site, and pretends that they are real and posting comments that are supposed to come from their mouths. This woman is lying and posing as other people, even stealing pictures of people she knows and pretending that they are someone else. She uses people's identity and hides behind them to escape her life and problems.

In regards to democratized media, this amateur poser is creating a hole in the faith of what is social media and user generated content. She is exactly the kind of people Keen talks about when he says that quality is going down in the web because of situations where things like this can occur.

Catfish was a creepy portrayal of a serious problem that is going on in the world today. Even social dating sites like Eharmony are having problems with background checks and sexual offenders posing to be other people. Now too many incidents have been reported that people are either lying or exaggerating themselves on the internet to lead people to meet them in person. This sort of media i believe is the scariest kind. Keen talks in his work that we can't trust everything written on the internet, but so often we forget that and i myself am even guilty of this. This is a perfect reminder that web 2.0 is not professional for the majority. We have to be careful when deciding what to not believe and what to fact check by credible sources.

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