WARNING: SPOILERS!
The above two videos are trailers for the recent documentary film Catfish, during which the main character (Nev) and his two best friends record an internet love story with a twist. One day, out of the blue, Nev receives a Facebook friend request from a young (elementary school level) girl, Abby, who likes to paint. Her mother (Angela) also friends Nev, and they all become both Facebook and IRL (in real life) friends--Abby's mother sends Nev paintings, letters, even money. Over e-mail, G-chat, and Facebook, Nev finds himself becoming a significant part of their lives, and visa versa. Nev also becomes Facebook friends with Abby's older sister, Megan, who is close to his age. The two exchange photos, videos, sound clips, etc. and about halfway through the film, become involved in a sort of "would-be" relationship: as Nev says, if they were to meet and have the same chemistry in person as they do online, they would instantaneously be in a relationship. Nev believes that everything Abby, Megan, and Angela is telling him is real and true because he sees these characters interacting with numerous other people--family and friends--via wall posts, tagged photos, etc. They have a real life, so they're real people.
Except, the spin is (surprise!) they're not. Nev and his friends decide to go visit Abby, Megan, and Angela--unannounced. They find their "home" abandoned, and in the second address Nev was given by Angela, they find Abby and Angela--neither of whom are who Nev expected them to be. The mother, who lives at home with her husband and his two severely handicapped sons (in addition to Abby), has been spending hours upon hours on multiple computers and cell phones creating an entire world that doesn't exist. She likes to paint, not Abby. She has fallen in love with Nev via her role-playing as Megan. She even goes as far as to lie to Nev and tell him she has cancer so he'll be sympathetic instead of angry when he finds out the truth.
How could Nev had guessed? He didn't meet one single girl through Craigslist or on Myspace, where it would be easier to spot a fake. He met an entire family, including cousins, aunts, uncles, sons, daughters, and friends. All of these fake characters interacted with each other and with other people, creating an online world that didn't exist. This film addresses many of the topics in this section's texts: Nev fell in love over the internet, leading us to question what "mating" has become and what role touch plays in the creation of a relationship; Angela created around 20 "living" characters, showing us that a life online isn't close to life in the "real" world; and questioning whether or not we even need physical bodies for digital and technological bodies to exist?
Was Angela crossing a line, or simply taking role-playing out of Second Life and into her "first" life? Ollivier Dyens defines what "artificial life" is, and it's scary to say that Angela's world of fake characters and manipulation doesn't seem too far from our own world of untagging and profile pictures: "A-life is also the cultural body, the human-saturated environment, the protection of endangered species, and the spread of automobiles. A-life is life that breaks away from biology, replication of culture rather than genetics. Artificial life is our extreme dependence upon electricity, our pharmaceutically maintained lifestyle, and our technologically controlled and protected existence" (94). By creating so many different people, Angela was spreading her "cultural DNA" in the same way that we do by opening up a twitter account or telling our friends to follow our Google Reader. Having so many different three-dimensional characters in a two-dimensional world made Angela extremely culturally relevant--they covered a huge range of ages, both the sexes, and many different types of personalities
It would appear to me that Angela was crossing a personal boundary...but not a cultural one. She had created artificial life and allowed it to grow and breathe without her (at one point in the film she tells Nev that the situation took control of her). Her world became, in the words of Dyens, a "living idea" (22). A "virtual being [...] is an expression of new life, a life made of signs, culture, and knowledge" (33). Angela's living idea became it's own cultural bubble--each of the characters did what a "real" person would be expected to do: listen to music, have favorite bands, like to make art, share pictures with his/her friends, respond to wall posts, comment on other people's content, etc. Her world was entirely made of signs, culture, and knowledge. And she manipulated all the signs to point to reality.
Is Angela a cyberpunk? Was Megan or Abby a cyberpunk? Dyens quotes Bruce Sterling as he says that cyberpunks are "hybrids," "brain-computer interfaces" (73). They are "a common narrative on the ride of a new type of cultural body (created and formed within computers)" (73). Each of Angela's characters was a blend of her own self (she was the one acting the parts, so there had to be at least a shred of herself in each person), what she would expect that character to do (a male persona would type differently than a female person, for instance), and a computer (each of these characters truly only existed within a computer). It seems as if this sort of interaction between a person and a computer is becoming the norm--it is not just a part of a bleak, A.I.-esque future. People around us in the normal world are creating "cultural bodies" that exist without physical bodies.
If someone were to take your internet presence, lift it up, and carry it over into a region of the country or world where it hadn't already reached, would it live on? Would you be able to create a following on Facebook and Twitter and Foursquare without using your physical body? The internet certainly has enough information about us to carry on without our bodies--hell, it can steal our bank account or spam our friend's e-mails. Who (or what) is more powerful here? Clearly the Internet has the power to mislead someone entirely in a way that a physical body couldn't. Our "soul abides in machines" (Dyens 95).
Except, the spin is (surprise!) they're not. Nev and his friends decide to go visit Abby, Megan, and Angela--unannounced. They find their "home" abandoned, and in the second address Nev was given by Angela, they find Abby and Angela--neither of whom are who Nev expected them to be. The mother, who lives at home with her husband and his two severely handicapped sons (in addition to Abby), has been spending hours upon hours on multiple computers and cell phones creating an entire world that doesn't exist. She likes to paint, not Abby. She has fallen in love with Nev via her role-playing as Megan. She even goes as far as to lie to Nev and tell him she has cancer so he'll be sympathetic instead of angry when he finds out the truth.
How could Nev had guessed? He didn't meet one single girl through Craigslist or on Myspace, where it would be easier to spot a fake. He met an entire family, including cousins, aunts, uncles, sons, daughters, and friends. All of these fake characters interacted with each other and with other people, creating an online world that didn't exist. This film addresses many of the topics in this section's texts: Nev fell in love over the internet, leading us to question what "mating" has become and what role touch plays in the creation of a relationship; Angela created around 20 "living" characters, showing us that a life online isn't close to life in the "real" world; and questioning whether or not we even need physical bodies for digital and technological bodies to exist?
(This is an image that Nev photoshoped--he sent it to Megan to "make her smile.")
Was Angela crossing a line, or simply taking role-playing out of Second Life and into her "first" life? Ollivier Dyens defines what "artificial life" is, and it's scary to say that Angela's world of fake characters and manipulation doesn't seem too far from our own world of untagging and profile pictures: "A-life is also the cultural body, the human-saturated environment, the protection of endangered species, and the spread of automobiles. A-life is life that breaks away from biology, replication of culture rather than genetics. Artificial life is our extreme dependence upon electricity, our pharmaceutically maintained lifestyle, and our technologically controlled and protected existence" (94). By creating so many different people, Angela was spreading her "cultural DNA" in the same way that we do by opening up a twitter account or telling our friends to follow our Google Reader. Having so many different three-dimensional characters in a two-dimensional world made Angela extremely culturally relevant--they covered a huge range of ages, both the sexes, and many different types of personalities
It would appear to me that Angela was crossing a personal boundary...but not a cultural one. She had created artificial life and allowed it to grow and breathe without her (at one point in the film she tells Nev that the situation took control of her). Her world became, in the words of Dyens, a "living idea" (22). A "virtual being [...] is an expression of new life, a life made of signs, culture, and knowledge" (33). Angela's living idea became it's own cultural bubble--each of the characters did what a "real" person would be expected to do: listen to music, have favorite bands, like to make art, share pictures with his/her friends, respond to wall posts, comment on other people's content, etc. Her world was entirely made of signs, culture, and knowledge. And she manipulated all the signs to point to reality.
Is Angela a cyberpunk? Was Megan or Abby a cyberpunk? Dyens quotes Bruce Sterling as he says that cyberpunks are "hybrids," "brain-computer interfaces" (73). They are "a common narrative on the ride of a new type of cultural body (created and formed within computers)" (73). Each of Angela's characters was a blend of her own self (she was the one acting the parts, so there had to be at least a shred of herself in each person), what she would expect that character to do (a male persona would type differently than a female person, for instance), and a computer (each of these characters truly only existed within a computer). It seems as if this sort of interaction between a person and a computer is becoming the norm--it is not just a part of a bleak, A.I.-esque future. People around us in the normal world are creating "cultural bodies" that exist without physical bodies.
(From the film A.I.)
If someone were to take your internet presence, lift it up, and carry it over into a region of the country or world where it hadn't already reached, would it live on? Would you be able to create a following on Facebook and Twitter and Foursquare without using your physical body? The internet certainly has enough information about us to carry on without our bodies--hell, it can steal our bank account or spam our friend's e-mails. Who (or what) is more powerful here? Clearly the Internet has the power to mislead someone entirely in a way that a physical body couldn't. Our "soul abides in machines" (Dyens 95).
I thought about this film when I was doing these readings. I like how you use it to discuss boundaries in the digital world, and whether Angela crossed any. The thing is that what we do online is not so different from what she did, although I doubt anyone here has taken it to that degree. When you sign up for facebook, you end up creating a digital version of yourself that is more or less accurate, and that personality interacts with those made by everyone else. LIke Angela, we also let the digital world leak in with the real one when we move discussion from online into our everyday, and vice versa. I'm wondering if the internet doesn't breed this kind of sickness. No one doubts that Angela is mentally not all there, but everyone does a certain amount of lying and creeping online, which may be something that the digital community naturally fosters.
ReplyDeleteYour application of Dyens' "virtual being" to describe Angela's Facebook persona accurately describes what she is: a being that exists solely in the virtual realm of the 2-d. Her online display of her "interactions" with "friends and family" made her real to Nev. Catfish's demonstration of just how easy it is to create believable personas that originate entirely from a person's imagination is disturbing, and is a cautionary tale to the 'relationships' that we might acquire in the digital realm. Nev and Angela's correspondences via technological mediums provided Nev with the experience of "getting to know" her. I particularly responded to your allusion to the fact that the physical body may one day become secondary in comparison to our cultural beings and that "artificial life" can closely imitate and perhaps one day replace our understanding of what constitutes 'real life.'
ReplyDelete-Claire Wong