Catfish

After watching the documentary “Catfish,” my perspective on Facebook, and social media in general shifted.  “Catfish’ is a documentary following Yaniv Schulman, and a few of his friends to meet his new “love interest” that he had been building a romantic relationship through Facebook.  This film revealed the harsh, scary and shocking reality of what goes on, over the Internet.  Web 2.0 has built a different world for people to live through and perhaps become someone they are not. Yaniv Schulman had to learn this the hard way when he began a romantic relationship with a girl named Megan, over Facebook.  He believed that this girl Megan was a stunning blonde who was around the same age.  After a road trip to go see Megan, Yaniv was struck with the disturbing truth of the situation.  He finds out that “Megan” that he had been talking to and falling for, happens to be a 40-year-old woman Angela, who had faked an identity over Facebook.  She not only made up a profile for a young girl “Megan,” she made up over 12 more profiles to build this alternate life, in order to escape her own.

            After Yaniv shows up for a surprise visit to Megan’s house and find out the truth behind this profile, he is shocked to say the least.  It is a hard situation to deal with.  Angela now tells Yaniv that she is battling cancer in an effort to make him feel bad for her.  She takes care of two mentally ill stepchildren and lives a sad, depressing life.  She used Facebook and Yaniv to leave this unhappy life and hide behind a computer screen to live a life of a young beautiful girl.  Instead of feeling violated, and becoming extremely angry with Angela, Yaniv tries his hardest to see past her disturbing behavior and learn about the “real” Angela.  Yaniv wanted to hear her out and learn the reasoning behind the 15 profiles that she had made, to upkeep this alternate life through Facebook and even a separate phone that she had used to text explicit messages to Yaniv.  He then began to feel for her and her situation.  The fact that her life was so unsatisfying, she turned to technology to meet and fulfill her needs of feeling wanted by others. 

            Personally, this story disturbs me.  I feel that what Angela did was nothing but disturbing and violating.  The fact that she was able to steal hundreds of photos of random people and creating this whole group of “friends” is what freaks me out the most.  The real Megan turned out to be a young woman, Aimee Gonzales.  Aimee was taken advantage of and her picture was exploited to thousands of people over Facebook as this “Megan” character.  Another hard thing to wrap my head around was that Angela was willing to lie about having cancer.  Such a disease affects so many lives negatively and for her to lie about having such a life threatening illness was baffling to me.  Her life must have been very unfulfilling for her to go through all of this trouble of making almost 15 different profiles and keeping up with each and every one.  This must have been very time consuming for her and she also had a young daughter and two special needs stepsons. 

            Throughout this course we have been educated about many ways Web 2.0 has an impact on our daily lives.  The evolution of the Internet had rapidly evolved into somewhat of an alternate reality.  Websites such as Facebook, Twitter and Myspace are all places people can go and potentially become someone they are not.  The Internet can be a scary place and the film Catfish just goes to show how potentially dangerous it can be.  Despite the fact that Yaniv did not get harmed or physically hurt, you could read it all over his face when he was speaking to Angela that he was emotionally torn down.  It was hard to think that he was going to meet this incredible girl that he had grown to develop feelings for, only to find out it was a 40 year old woman impersonator.

            There are some critics out there that are convinced that this documentary was completely staged.  They believe that this film was made to educate and show the viewers how the Internet can mask one’s identity.  Anyone could have been the victim and gotten their pictures stole and thrown into the whirlwind of Angela’s alternate life.  It could have been me.  That’s scary.  Whether or not everything is “fake” or “real” there had to have been scenes that were reenacted and the directors and makers of the movie fessed up to that.  They told the press that some of the screen shots were put in later but that doesn’t take away and credibility to the film.

            It is odd to me how people care so much if it is real or not.  It is a movie, and there for out entertainment.  I understand that some people may feel the need to know the “true” story, but why discredit those who made the film?  It was a very entertaining film and for all I know it is a true story and that is the creepy part about it.  Web 2.0 has allowed us to do things we would have never thought would be possible 50 years ago.  We now mainly communicate through technology.  Between Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Blogging, Myspace, and Texting, we really don’t even need to see anyone face to face.  We can see what our friends are doing Friday night at 9:07 just from visiting their Facebook page.  It is getting very intrusive as well.  Without realizing it, people are disclosing a lot of their personal information to websites such as Facebook and later on could become a privacy issue.  Facebook owns the rights to anything you put on your Facebook page.  Nowadays, people are losing jobs from one picture on their profile.  This new day and age has changed the way people communicate.

            With the Internet growing, more and more user generated content is taking over.  Andrew Keen has showed us how democratized media is eliminating the middle man.  There are not fact checkers anymore and now anything on the Internet could potentially not be reliable information.  With the ability to create your own websites and paste facts, pictures, information etc, it is hard to see the truth from the rest.  I believe this foreshadows our future.  It is only going to get harder for us to see past all the smog and impersonators on the Internet.  It will only get harder for us to see what is true and what to ignore.  We need to take the lesson within Catfish and learn from it.   

                         

Exit Through The Gift Shop

“Exit Through The Gift Shop” is a documentary following the evolution and impact of graffiti through the eyes of an amateur filmmaker, Thierry Guetta.  He began by wanting to meet someone he idolized, Banksy, a famous street artist known around the world by his eclectic, extreme and even controversial pieces.  Guetta started out following Banksy around while he created his pieces.  Catching the process of creating street art was Guetta’s goal and he ended up traveling the world with Banksy and accumulating a lot of footage.  After Banksy, many other street artists agreed to participate in Guetta’s documentary.  These street artists included other well known graffiti artisits, Shepard Fairey and Invader.  After Guetta accumulates a lot of film, Banksy convinces him to attempt to put everything together and make a movie.  This is a fail; the final product is very choppy and seems as if the viewer keeps changing the channel every 7 seconds.  There is no story line or fluidity to it.  Once Guetta realizes this project is a fail, the camera is flipped on him and Banksy begins to film Thierry’s journey or evolving into a street artist himself.  Thierry then names himself Mr. Brainwash as his “tag.”  The film ends up evolving into something completely different than what Guetta set out for it to turn into. 

            Thierry Guetta’s work seemed to me to be far from original.  I had not seen one piece that was original, or even straight from Guetta’s creative mind.  It made me question even if he was a creative person.  He was unable to put together the simplest of film footage to tell a story of the infamous Banksy and how he went about creating his work.  Weather it was taking the famous piece of art work American Gothic and putting gas masks on the famous painting, or simply using Andy Warhol’s signature style only manipulating someone else’s face with different, crazy colors.  Along with his lack of originality, it also seems as if Guetta does not even do much of his work.  He had hired a team of people to bring a lot of his work to life.  He may have been hands on with some of his projects, but he also seemed to not care about being open about the fact that his team did mostly everything for him.  Without a lot of his workers, it seemed as if his first art show would not have happened.  It seems very hypocritical because to be a “street artist” you need to be very original and creative and then he aspires to be a big, famous artist yet he does not do any of the work himself.

            After reading two of the articles that had seemed to believe that the whole movie must be a spoof and really all of the “actors” are trying to relay a message regarding originality within street art.  If some of those speculations are true, it makes more sense then the actual movie does.  If Banksy is really “Thierry Guetta” it would make sense because all he wants people to take from the movie is to see the unoriginality of all of Guetta’s pieces of work.  Street art is not easy, it is an expression of one’s emotions, beliefs or interests but it does take some creativeness and all Guetta did in the film, was take commercialized art pieces, that are already famous, and tweaked them or simply splattered paint on top of these printed images and put them all around his gallery.  

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The Great Seduction By: Andrew Keen

Q1:  Andrew Keen defines "democratized media" as the was people are always connected to the Internet, and how Web 2.0 would democratize media, business' and even the Government.  Keen originally was very involved with wanting to expand the music world through the Internet.  Once everyone had access to the Internet and people began being able to share their own non-professional, self-made music.  Keen hated this because he believed it belittled expertise, experience and talent.  To "disintermediate" it is the act of doing away with all the professional levels to go through in order to have a professional blog, movie reviews, any sort of talents, etc.      
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHH3Rqjnj38

Q2:  I believe Andrew Keen and Douglass Rushkoff have similar, yet different views on Web 2.0.  Keen has a very negative, pessimistic outlook on how the Internet has evolved and how it basically rules our lives right now.  Rushkoff also believes our lives revolve too much around the Internet yet he does more research in how and why the Internet has become what it is today.  Rushkoff is able to at least wrap his head around the fact that the Internet is still evolving and a lot of what we do in our everyday lives from blogging, to chatting, to business meetings surround the use of the Internet.  At least Rushkoff is accepting of this phenomenon, whereas Keen feels because of all of the amateurs on the Internet, there are no experienced professionals in any given field.  He especially does not like the fact that websites such as Pandora, used for listening to music, can predict what type of music you would like to listen to based on what you are currently listening to.  Because Keen is so into the sharing and spreading of music, he thinks that "artificial intelligence" is not as accurate as taste.    

Blogs I commented on

I commented on Eric Johansen's blog and Mike Florio's blog.  My longer comment was on Corey March's blog.