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Online Relationships In Meghan Daum's Catfish

796 Words4 Pages

Catfish begins with the fan mail of a young girl, Abby, to New York based photographer Nev Schulman. As they continue their innocent online correspondence, Nev is introduced to the rest of Abby’s family. Specifically, Nev is introduced to Megan, Abby’s older sister. Megan and Nev begin having an online relationship. The relation continues and grows to be more serious, however Nev notices some red flags that point to Megan not being truthful. When Nev goes to Michigan where Megan lives, he discovers that she was in fact Abby’s mother, Angela. Additionally, everything about Abby had been fabricated. Catfish leads viewers to one central question: Why are people drawn to online interactions? Meghan Daum is a New York based freelance writer. She writes about her experience in an online relationship in her article, “Virtual Love.” Similarly to Schulman, what began …show more content…

With the immense number of online profiles Angela has, it can be inferred that Angela’s online life is a sizeable time commitment. Daum too found herself putting forth a large amount of time into her online relationship. Daum writes, “I was certainly putting more energy into the online relationship than I had put into may others” (Daum 139). Turkle would comment on this and assert that the reason most online relationships are time consuming is that they enable a moratorium from life. Additionally, Both Daum and Turkle would agree that online personas offer an escape from the hardships life. As Turkle describes, cyberspace is “a place to ‘act out’ unresolved issues… For others it provides an opportunity to ‘work through significant personal issues” (Turkle 149). Part of why Angela became consumed with online life is because she was escaping her everyday hardships. Angela had no job, and only took care of her three children. Because two of her kids have severe mental handicaps, she isn’t able to experience life as she

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