“Catfished”: Learning to Communicate in a Social Media Age
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how our means of communicating with one another are changing drastically. And what sort of consequences come from this transitionary phase of communication? What immediately comes to mind is the movie Catfish, and the subsequent MTV reality show of the same name. For those of you not familiar with the Catfish phenomenon, here is the movie trailer:
In the MTV show, the host Nev investigates other suspicious online relationships and usually the one who seeks out Nev finds out that their love interest is not who they thought they were. Either they are hiding something like their gender, or true identity, or sexuality, every show is a strange look into how Facebook is being used to give some people new identities.
However, the majority of social media users aren’t being duped into falling for complete strangers via social media. On a much more mundane level, we are instead reconnecting with old flames and finding new ones. Recently, a friend of mine got back in touch with an ex-boyfriend from high school. They talk online for awhile before taking their conversations to texts and after only two months she decided to go visit him in Alaska.
What she found there wasn’t the attentive and charming personality that she’d conversed with online. Instead he was a rude, disrespectful drunk. While he was at least the same person she’d talked to through Facebook, he was also completely different than he’d come across. So that leads me to the question, how well do we really know the people we are getting to know through Facebook? Even if these people aren’t complete strangers, what exactly do we lose when we choose to communicate through social media instead of face-to-face?
More than this, what does communicating through social media mean for the future of interpersonal communication as a whole? Nonverbal communication with morph into something else entirely. Instead of facial cues it will be emoji cues. Rather than body language we will dissect response times and the amount of “lols” used. So whether the future is bright or not remains to be seen, but it is without question that we are experiencing a paradigm shift in communication.