662709
research-article2016
TVNXXX10.1177/1527476416662709Television & New MediaLovelock
Article
Catching a Catfish:
Constructing the “Good”
Social Media User in Reality
Television
Television & New Media
2017, Vol. 18(3) 203–217
© The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/1527476416662709
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Michael Lovelock1
Abstract
This article interrogates the cultural work of “old” media texts that take social media
use as a narrative focus. Using the MTV reality show Catfish: The TV Show as a case
study, I argue that, in this program, the specific conventions of reality television—
authenticity, confession, and self-realization—work to produce and circulate
normative scripts of “appropriate” and “inappropriate” ways to articulate the self on
social media, which align with reality TV’s established investment in the concept of the
“authentic” self. Furthermore, I argue that the show’s representations of social media
use valorize the primacy of connecting with and accepting one’s “real” self, making
legible a subject position that speaks particularly to young people—the program’s
target demographic—in the contemporary juncture of 2010s “crisis” neoliberalism,
by transposing political questions into personal crises.
Keywords
social media, reality television, Facebook, Catfish: The TV Show, catfishing, identity
Introduction
The reason [I did it] was because I had so many self-esteem issues. I used to cut myself,
like, I couldn’t handle the depression anymore, so I had to find something to make myself
happy. And it was bad, I understand, but I got so much out of it. That’s the crazy thing
about the internet, you can be whoever you want to be. (Catfish: The TV Show, Season 1
Episode 5)
1University
of East Anglia, Norwich, UK
Corresponding Author:
Michael Lovelock, School of Art, Media and American Studies, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4
7TJ, UK.
Email: m.lovelock@uea.ac.uk
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Television & New Media 18(3)
With the above lines, taken from an episode of the reality television program Catfish:
The TV Show (MTV, 2012–), a young woman describes her motivations for “catfishing.” Catfishing, in this context, refers to the construction of a “fake” profile on a
social networking platform, a profile which does not correspond to a user’s “real”
identity. In this sequence, scripts of social media use are articulated through the reality
televisual tropes of discussing one’s feelings in a confessional and emotional manner.
This discursive process positions catfishing as the epitome of “bad” social media use,
symptomatic of an unhealthy or problematic subjectivity that is yearning for therapeutic resolution.
Although scholarship on online social networking sites (SNS) proliferates, little
research has interrogated the relationships between SNS and so-called old media, such
as television (Dubrofsky 2011). Seeking to address this epistemological gap, Rachel
Dubrofsky (2011, 114) has brought SNS into dialogue with reality TV, arguing that
both are “symptomatic texts” of a cultural context in which performing certain versions of the self under conditions of surveillance has become naturalized. Dubrofsky
(2011, 115) also notes that references to SNS have become “ubiquitous in popular
culture,” including on television. However, the specific ways in which SNS use is
represented in old media, and the cultural work these representations do, are yet to be
subject to detailed critical interrogation.
This article contributes to scholarly understandings of the relationships between old
and new media through an analysis of Catfish: The TV Show, a program which takes
SNS use as a structural narrative focus. Through analysis of localized moments from
across the first and second seasons of the show, I explore how in this text, the discursive and semiotic conventions of reality television, especially the genre’s investment
in authenticity, self-realization, and searching for the “real,” work to produce and circulate a normative mandate to represent oneself “authentically” on social media.
Attention to these kinds of textual processes is important for scholars of new media, as
it enables an interrogation of how seemingly common-sense ideas around the “right”
and “wrong” ways to use SNS are shaped not only by the interfaces of the platforms
themselves but also by external cultural products about social media.
Moreover, Catfish: The TV Show is an important object of study because the program exemplifies how representations of SNS in “old” media, such as reality TV, have
become a highly visible cultural framework through which broader discourses of self
and subjectivity are produced. These discourses, particularly in this context of notions
of the authentic self, have profound significance for everyday life, working to enable
and delimit the ways in which selfhood and identity are able to be made sense of in the
contemporary, neoliberal moment. Reality TV shows have been widely discussed as
core fabrics on which neoliberal ideologies have permeated everyday life and culture
(Woodstock 2014). Catfish: The TV Show does particularly potent cultural work in this
regard, due to its specific address to a millennial youth consumer through its location
within the MTV brand. As Stephanie Genz (2015) has argued, neoliberalism’s pull to
“authentic” subjectivities can harbor different implications for different forms of identity. This article therefore also interrogates how, in Catfish: The TV Show, the production of norms of SNS use through the conventions of reality TV makes legible a
Lovelock
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particular youth subject position, one which seeks to rationalize, rather than critique,
the “chaos, uncertainty and insecurity” (Silva 2013, 6) increasingly facing young people under 2010’s “crisis” neoliberalism.
The Program
In the context of digital media, a “catfish” refers to “A person who sets up a false profile on a social networking site for fraudulent or deceptive purposes.” As this definition, taken from the Merriam Webster online dictionary, makes clear, catfish or
catfishing (the act of being a catfish) are culturally construed as highly negative entities and practices, bound to a series of normative assumptions about “right” and
“wrong” ways to represent oneself on SNS. Stories of catfishing span a spectrum of
media texts, from reality TV, to news media, to talk shows. Of these texts, Catfish: The
TV Show (first broadcast in 2012, and in its fifth season at the time of writing) has
provided some of the most consistent and wide-reaching representations of the phenomenon of catfishing.
In each episode, the show’s presenter, Nev Shulman (whose own story of falling
victim to a catfish, as told in the 2010 documentary film Catfish, inspired the series),
is contacted by a member of the public who claims to be in a romantic relationship
with someone he or she “met” on social media, have only ever communicated with via
digital technologies, and whom he or she therefore suspects may be a catfish. Nev and
his filmmaking companion Max travel to the home of the potential catfishing victim,
who explains his or her story. Nev and Max then set about proving that the suspect
profile is indeed a catfish. Images from the profile are processed through search
engines that locate their legitimate origin on the web; “friends” from the catfish profile
are made contact with, who invariably profess to never having met with this person in
“real life,” and so on. Nev then reaches out to the catfish to arrange a face-to-face
meeting between the catfish and their victim. While the first half of the program
revolves around establishing the catfish profile’s (inevitable lack of) legitimacy, the
second concerns the therapeutic and cathartic redemption of the catfish herself/himself. As I explore in more detail below, in almost every episode, once exposed, the
catfish discusses why he or she felt compelled to adopt a “fake” online identity, evoking some form of fractured subjectivity. At the same time, however, they almost invariably claim that their romantic feelings for their victim are real, and that they do
genuinely love them. Through the intervention of the program the catfish vow to work
on learning to accept their “real” selves, and to represent themselves “authentically”
online in the future.
The logic of the show is therefore predicated on an artificial distinction between
“online” and “offline” selves. Scholarship on digital media has long complicated
online/offline dichotomies through the concept of augmented reality, which encapsulates how the embededdness of digital technologies and networks within everyday life
has rendered the online and the offline, the digital and the embodied, impossible to
prise apart (cf. Craig 2013). As a text, Catfish: The TV Show is thus engaged in the
cultural work of discursively reproducing the fiction of an online/offline split
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in relation to selfhood and digital media. In the show, the embodied, offline self is
conceived as the location of the “real,” and the morally “correct” way conceive selfrepresentation on SNS is as an almost seamless continuation of one’s “real” offline self
into the digital environment. The perniciousness of the catfish stems from their mobilization of an online identity that does not match up with their supposedly authentic
offline self. In the show, this jars with the incitement to authenticity on SNS proffered
by the text and also contravenes the broader mandate of reality television that individuals strive to “be themselves” at all times (discussed below).
It is also important to note that the catfish and his or her victim never meet on the
kinds of dating sites that constitute the normative digital platforms for seeking out
romantic relationships. Rather, in the majority of episodes the catfish has first made
contact with his or her partner by a “random” friend request on Facebook. On one
level, then, the discourses of good/bad SNS usage that the show produces relate particularly to the Facebook platform. Through features such as “People You May Know,”
the architecture of Facebook centralizes the forging of connections with people that
users already know outside of the platform. Bound to Catfish: The TV Show’s status as
a kind of cautionary tale of social media use gone wrong is therefore the suggestion
that both the catfish and their duped victim have been using this platform “incorrectly.” This compounds each episode’s narrative resolution in which, for the catfish,
a fantasmatic vision of the future defined by a romantic relationship with their victim
(often conjoined, as I explore later, with material wealth and success) is given up in
exchange for working to realize their authentic self. Often, however, within the program, different forms of digital communication are collapsed into a catch-all rhetoric
of “on the Internet.” This posits a value in authenticity that transcends platform differentials, suggesting that the show also uses SNS to circulate a broader discourse
around the primacy of authenticity in all aspects of everyday life. As I explore later, in
this text, this valorization of the authentic self corresponds to neoliberal ideals that
speak in particular to young people in a juncture of 2010s “crisis” neoliberalism.
Selfhood and Authenticity on Social Media and Reality TV
In this article, authenticity denotes a conception of selfhood as a unique and innate set
of personality traits, desires, and emotional and intellectual dispositions, which are
perceived to form a psychological “inner life” of the individual (Rose 1998, 22). I am
approaching authenticity and the authentic (or “real” or “true”) self as discursively
constructed ideas about self and subjectivity, which attain cultural legibility through
their linguistic and semiotic production in cultural texts. Genz (2015, 548) has argued
that, in the contemporary moment, ideals of authenticity have become “a boundary
strategy between self-hood and neoliberal capitalism.” The concept of the authentic
self has, in part, enabled the expansion of neoliberalism from an economic rationality
into an ethos that structures how individuals come to understand their self-identities.
The imperative to connect with and articulate the authentic self, particularly through
practices of confession and self-branding, has become central to the neoliberal project
of the self, conceptualizing individuals as “entrepreneurial actors defined by their
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capacity for autonomy and self-care” (Genz 2015, 548). Popular cultural discourses
that position the attainment of authenticity as the solution to all manner of personal
and political problems therefore reconcile human identity with the dismantling of collective, state provisions, and the concomitant demands of individualism and self-sufficiency integral to neoliberalism. The concept of the catfish attains its portentous
cultural charge through its apparent rejection of the incitement to authenticity central
to such popular understandings of self and subjectivity.
The relevance of the concept of the authentic self in relation to SNS has, however,
been a site of disagreement among scholars. Dubrofsky (2011) and Jodi Dean (2010),
for example, have argued that (unlike reality television) selfhood on SNS is performed
through actions and interactions that form a proliferation of data, yet that do not necessarily need to be coalesced into a coherent narrative of selfhood or identity. For these
scholars, self-performance on SNS is engineered to produce a stream of data that can
be captured and circulated through the commercial, corporate, and economic structures of these sites. Others, however, have argued that SNS do encourage the idea of
“authentic” self-representation, and thus reproduce the concept of the authentic self
(Banet-Weiser 2012; Cover 2012; Ellis 2010; Van Dijck 2013). José Van Dijck (2013,
212) points, for instance, to Facebook’s “real name” policy, which is based on “the
ideology of people having only one ‘authentic’ identity that is transparent and does not
hold secrets,” while the platform’s Timeline architecture enables a continuous, linear
narrative of selfhood to be forged through one’s mediations on the site. These scholars
have located the impetus to authenticity on SNS as partly a response to a cultural need
for individuals to process their actions and interactions, both digital and embodied,
into the image of a consistent and intrinsic self (Cover 2012). SNS are configured here
as discursive apparatus through which users are able to make sense of their identities
by drawing on, and rearticulating, culturally specific ideals of authentic subjectivity.
These arguments bring SNS into dialogue with broader sociological claims around the
perceived breakdown of collective means of identity formation, such as local community and religion, in contemporary society. Sociologists have claimed that in this
context, forming a coherent sense of “who you are” has become fraught with difficulty
(Brown 1999). In this dialectic, SNS becomes a tool for mitigating the ontological
uncertainty that the modern age has appeared to induce.
My argument in this article builds on this latter position on authenticity, selfhood,
and SNS. Catfish: The TV Show demonstrates that the incitement to authenticity on
SNS is produced not only within the interfaces of SNS themselves but also in outside
media that engage SNS as a format or narrative object. Reality television has also been
positioned within the sociological context outlined above (Tincknell and Raghuram
2002), and Catfish: The TV Show makes literal, on a micro-level, a broader discursive
process in which authenticity has become consolidated as a norm of SNS self-presentation because it makes sense in relation to broader epistemologies of self-identity.
Discussing the early mainstreaming of the Internet, Mark Stefik (1997) argued that
the rise of online technologies was accompanied by the sedimentation of various
“myths” about the Internet across a spectrum of cultural texts. These myths, he claimed,
worked to reconcile the Internet, which had the potential to profoundly transform
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received modes of thinking about self and society, with established frameworks of
knowledge, which in turn shaped normative understandings of online communication
through these existing epistemological norms. Approaching the phenomenon of catfishing through this conceptual framework enables an interrogation of the ways in
which the catfish has come to circulate as a cultural myth that fixes certain meanings
and norms of usage to SNS. Part of how Catfish: The TV Show is able to attain this
mythic function is through its particular status as a reality TV show.
Before continuing, it is important to emphasize that ideals of authenticity in relation
to SNS do not necessarily translate to a wholly transparent and unexpurgated sharing
of one’s supposedly “real” self/life. Concepts such as “impression management”
(Rosenberg and Egbert 2011) and “self-branding” (Banet-Weiser 2012) have encapsulated some of the ways in which SNS users are selective, partial, and strategic in their
online self-mediations to present themselves in particularly flattering or positive ways.
However, this is not seen to compromise the essential authenticity of SNS self-representation. As Sarah Banet-Weiser (2012) has argued, online self-branding has become
construed as a means of realizing and displaying one’s authenticity, an assertion that
taps into a history of cultural ideals around the power of technological mediation to
solidify or confirm an individual’s identity as authentic or real.
Paradigmatic of this discourse is reality TV, which has frequently staked a claim to
representing the “real” in the selves and subjectivities of those depicted onscreen.
Reality programs have often posited an almost causal relationship between their own
statuses as constructed and mediated texts, and the revelation of participants’ purportedly authentic selves. As Mark Andrejevic (2004, 108) has noted, in the logic of reality
TV, “surveillance provides a certain guarantee of authenticity . . . this authenticity
becomes a process of self-expression, self-realization, and self-validation” (also Holmes
2006). Andrejevic has conceptualized reality TV as having naturalized surveillance as
a benevolent rather than punitive force, with the power to bring out one’s authentic self
in line with the neoliberal mandate to self-sufficiency through self-realization.
Through this discursively constituted relationship between authenticity and mediation, reality shows frequently display self-awareness of their own statuses as constructed, televisual environments, calling on viewers to assess which onscreen
participants are being “real” and who, in opposition, is being “fake” and performing
for the cameras. As Dubrofsky (2011, 117) has noted, the “good” reality TV participant behaves “As he or she is imagined to behave in an unsurveilled space,” offering
a vision of selfhood that appears “consistent across disparate social spaces and at
different times . . . To be seen as adopting a behavior specifically designed for the
space of [reality TV] immediately designates a participant as inauthentic, unreal and
suspect.”
In Catfish: The TV Show, this imperative to maintain a consistent selfhood across
mediated and non-mediated time and space is transposed onto the dialectic of offline
and online activity I discussed previously. Norms of behavior in relation to SNS—that
one’s online and offline selves must be fused together into an almost seamless articulation of an intrinsic and authentic self—are sculpted through established mandates of
self-representation embedded within reality television.
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“I Just Want You to Be Real”: Mediation, Emotion, and
the “Real”
Catfish: The TV Show plays out a complex dialogue between reality television and
SNS, sculpting epistemologies of normative social media usage through the tropes and
conventions of reality TV. Foremost, the series works to emphasize the power of television to make manifest the purportedly authentic selfhoods of those it represents in
ways inaccessible to new media platforms. In the show, the truth of selfhood is positioned as only fully capturable by the immanent lenses of the reality TV cameras,
which, in this text, occupy a central role in fixing a particular semiotics of authenticity
to the catfish’s material body. Throughout each episode, cameras, particularly in the
act of filming, are repeatedly visually evoked. In numerous shots, Max is shown filming events on his small, digital video camera, which are juxtaposed with shots of a
grainier quality, connoting that this is footage filmed on Max’s camera itself.
Furthermore, the wider film crew, with their larger, shoulder-mounted cameras, are
also often visible inside the frame and referred to in lines of dialogue. These recurrent
representations of the modes of production not only cement the claims to reality of the
text but also construct the camera itself as a technology of authenticity.
It is not just the spatial, embodied proximity between the camera and the catfish
that is construed as enabling the revelation of who the catfish “really is,” however,
but more so the series’ broader claim that placing a subject before the reality television cameras bears the elusive power to bring forth the authentic self located within
this corporeal shell. As Su Holmes (2006, 61) has argued, much reality programming suggests that authentic selves are “‘found’ or released by the reality experience
and its vaguely therapeutic and transforming qualities, [which are] imagined as having brought forth the real self which was there (‘inside’) all along” (I discuss the
therapeutic dynamics of this process in the next section). Moreover, scholars have
argued that in reality TV, the “authentic” self is frequently coded through images of
emotionality (Aslama and Pantti 2006; Dubrofsky 2009). Dubrofsky (2009) has
argued that many sequences in reality TV build toward a kind of “money shot,” a
moment of seemingly uncontrolled emotional expression, where participants appear
to lose control of themselves and surrender to an outpouring of raw emotion, made
visible on and through the body, the seeming uncontainability of which constructs
this expression as real.
Such grammars of authenticity-through-emotion are abundantly represented in
Catfish: The TV Show. In this specific text, however, this reality TV trope does additional cultural work, sculpting and circulating normative epistemologies around how
to present one’s identity on SNS, in which are embedded broader discursive frameworks for making sense of contemporary subjectivity. In most episodes, when confronted in the face-to-face meeting, the catfish initially refuses to show remorse for his
or her apparent online deception. Yet, under the glare of the reality TV lens, she or he
gradually breaks down, confessing the error of his or her ways and explaining how his
or her compulsion to catfish stemmed from some form of personal or psychological
turmoil and an inability to embrace who he or she “really is.”
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For example, in Season 2, Episode 2, the catfish, Framel (an overweight and unattractive young man who had been masquerading online as the handsome and muscular
Marq), when confronted at his home by Nev, Max, and his victim, Anthony, initially
refuses to make a sincere apology, stubbornly shaking his head and rolling his eyes.
Anthony shouts, “I just want you to be [bleeped expletive] real . . . I just want you to
own up to being a [bleep] up person!” Framel then suddenly shouts back, “You are not
about to put me back in that place in my life. I said I was a [bleeped] up person then,
I’m not [bleeped] up person now. It is what it is.” On these lines, the camera abruptly
pans to Framel, tremblingly zooming in on his face at a jarring speed, as if straining to
capture a spontaneous and uncalculated surge of emotion, as Framel’s eyes grow wide
and he gesticulates violently.
This very visible pouring forth of the catfish’s vulnerable, fractured, and deficient
subjectivity through emotion before the TV cameras is positioned as enabling the realization of the need to be true to his or her apparently essential self. Framel’s vigorous
exclamation, and its textual framing, signify the initial emergence of his authentic self,
leading into a segment where he explains that he constructed the fake online persona
due to a sense of self-loathing born out of a physical accident that led him to put on
weight, compounded by his family’s inability to accept that he was gay. As he tells his
story, the camera lingers on Framel’s face in close-up, his voice breaks, and tears
stream down his cheeks, which he attempts to wipe away with his hand. A soundtrack
of long, melancholic, ethereal notes bridges a cut to Anthony sitting opposite who has
also begun to cry. The real here is coded not only through the uncontainability of
Framel’s own emotions as he narrates his “truthful” biography, but through how
Anthony, who moments earlier was shouting at Framel and threatening violence,
appears caught up in a moment of affective transmission (Brennan 2004), feeling and
intensity overriding rationality and cognition. At the culmination of this sequence,
Framel confesses his wrongdoing, imploring of Anthony, “I need your forgiveness.”
In this show, placing the catfish within the self-revelatory apparatus of reality TV is
construed as a means of re-situating the aberrant, inauthentic SNS user within the normative, neoliberal trajectory of individual empowerment through finding and displaying the authentic self. In this way, Catfish: The TV Show’s money-shot segments often
emphasize the crucial role of mediation in making visible the catfish’s authentic self,
and enabling their eventual realization of their apparently failed subjectivity, of which
their “inappropriate” SNS usage is construed as symptomatic. In Season 2, Episode 4,
Kristen, the catfish, whose deficient sense of self is attributed to a car accident that left
her with a prosthetic eye and led her to gain weight, initially appears defensive toward
Nev, Max, and her victim in the face-to-face confrontation. As she speaks, however, her
face turns red and she starts to well up in tears. Again, in this episode, the emergence of
the catfish’s “real” self is coded through a moment of verbal exclamation. Kristen
shouts, “I never used to be the fat girl. I was this skinny chick that got what she wanted,
and then I had my accident and everything changed. Everything!” Crying, she attempts
to stem her tears with her hand, leaving a smudge of mascara across her eyes. During
this outburst, the text cuts back and forth between a medium shot of Nev and Max, with
his camera held up in the act of filming, and medium shots of Kristen, in which another
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member of the camera crew is partially visible behind her. Interspersed within this
montage are digital images of her “fake” online persona, their imprecise and pixelated
quality contrasting with the sharper focus of the TV cameras’ footage. Reality TV, metonymically represented by the camera, is thus constructed as a domain of authenticity,
offering access to the “real” in ways unattainable on SNS. In this textual process, norms
of SNS self-representation are produced through the optic of established understandings of what it means to be real or to have a self, attached to the reality TV form.
Kristen’s identity is grounded in an interwoven dichotomy of offline/online, real/false,
in which her physical body, and the emotionality this produces, are demarcated as the
ultimate location of her “real” self.
“I Don’t Think There’s a Rehab for Fake Facebook
Profiles”: Therapy, Selfhood, and Youth Identity in
“Crisis” Neoliberalism
Central to the cultural work of Catfish: The TV Show, both in its production of norms
of SNS use and the demarcation of broader ideals of selfhood through this, is the
notion that failing to be authentic online is evidence of an unhealthy subjectivity, irreconcilable with happiness and fulfillment. However, the show does proffer mediation
through reality TV as not only a means of making tangible real selves, but also as
instigating a process of resolving the catfish’s state of ontological crisis. The initial
moments of emotional revelation analyzed above are followed, in almost every episode, by sequences in which the catfish sits down with Nev and Max, and verbally
expands on the troubled relationship with his or her identity that led him or her to
catfish. These scenes are paradigmatic of the kind of therapeutic, confessional talk that
traverses reality TV. Foucault (1998), in his work on confession, argued that confession takes place within a power relationship in which the ability to confess is enabled
by an authority figure to which the confession is told. In traditional religious or medical confessionals (the focus of Foucault’s text), this authority was a priest or doctor,
who not only hears the confession but also confirms, discursively, its ability to heal or
transform. In the televised confession, as Mimi White (2003) has noted, this authority
is endowed within the medium of television itself. In Catfish: The TV Show, besides
his self-identification as “someone who struggled in middle school and high school
with who I was, and being comfortable, and also not being popular” (S1E1), Nev himself has no professional credentials as a therapist. What qualifies him to take this role
is his connection to the media. Integral to this relationship between confession and
television is the notion that certain kinds of TV shows as TV shows, including talk
shows (White 2003) and, significantly for my focus here, reality television, can function as a therapeutic apparatus through the emphasis on emotionality and self-disclosure integral to these formats (Andrejevic 2004; Dubrofsky 2007; Woodstock 2014).
In Season 1, Episode 7 of Catfish: The TV Show, Rose, the catfish, discusses feeling
“addicted” to creating fraudulent SNS profiles. She states, “I really can’t stop, I feel
addicted. I don’t think there’s a rehab for fake Facebook profiles.” Nev replies, “Well,
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there’s this . . .” gesturing to himself and Rose sitting together at the table. This “this”
encapsulates both Rose’s opportunity to confess her imperiled subjectivity to Nev
himself, in a set-up that is very reminiscent of a psychotherapy session, and the broader
importance that this confession is mediated via the therapeutic domain of reality TV.
In consonance with the genre’s investment in the authentic self, as Dubrofsky
(2007, 267) has argued, therapy in reality television is often centered not on changing
the self, but “embracing” the self that one already, intrinsically, has, learning to “admit
that one’s ‘true’ or ‘authentic’ self is good.” In this framework, what is transformed
through therapy is one’s relationship with the self, a transformation in which the intervention of television itself is construed as fundamental (Dubrofsky 2007).
Catfish: The TV Show evokes these kinds of discourses to play out an ethical condemnation of catfishing, and produce norms of SNS usage through this, in highly
therapeutic and existential terms. This is epitomized in Season 1, Episode 8, where
Aaron, a young, overweight, African American gay man, has been posing as Amanda
Miller, a conventionally attractive, Caucasian girl, to engage in online relationships
with heterosexual young men. During the confessional sequence, Aaron explains to
Nev that he began catfishing to feel “liked,” something that he did not have access to
in his “offline” life due to experiences of homophobic abuse. Responding to Aaron’s
story, Nev states, “But you don’t even like you,” to which Aaron replies, “No, not
really . . . I don’t know who I am yet, so there’s always [the chance to] change.” Aaron
evokes an ambivalent coupling of ontology and stasis, whereby the intervention of the
show has initiated a process of self-discovery and self-acceptance. Nev’s therapeutic
counseling to Aaron stresses the need for him to “Really own who you are and your
problems and your failures and your insecurities,” re-casting the social prejudice that
Aaron tells of having faced as a personal crisis to be resolved through connecting with
his authentic self.
Similarly, in Season 1 Episode 1, Nev asks the catfish, Chelsea, a young bisexual
woman who had been posing as a male model to attain online intimacy with heterosexual females, “You spend a lot of time lying on the Internet. Where does that stem
from?” Chelsea replies,
Being bullied in high school, that, somewhat, could have had something to do with this.
I mean, throughout the past few years I’ve been called dyke, lesbian, fag, fat-ass, you
know, everything. I definitely missed out on a lot of things in high school, like proms,
dances. . . .
In this statement, the persona that Chelsea adopted online attains a complex entanglement of the real and the fake. Her catfishing becomes construed as the expression of
an essential and innate queer desire, but one which she was unable to express in an
“appropriate” manner. The string of homophobic and sizeist slurs that Chelsea says
have been directed toward her, alongside her apparent exclusion from “proms” and
“dances”—events associated with formalized rituals of heterosexual courtship—
emphasize how her bisexual identity had been experienced in painful opposition to
normative expectations of heterosexuality. This sense of subjective dissonance is
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213
further compounded by her departure from traditional ideals of bodily beauty and size.
Again, Nev’s advice is dispensed at the level of the personal, encouraging Chelsea to
reflect on “how wonderful your friendships could be [if] you’re just yourself.”
Chelsea and Aaron’s catfishing is suggested to have enabled them to “escape” suffering pertaining to stigmatized facets of their identities, and access forms of social
privilege denied them in their embodied, social interactions due to racial, sexual, and
gendered hierarchies and inequalities. This is not unique to these episodes. Across the
program, catfishing enables people of color to pass online as white, gay people as
straight, transgender as cisgender, fat as thin, and poor as rich. As the examples I have
drawn on thus far make clear, catfishing is repeatedly construed as a disharmony with,
or inability to accept or express some aspect of one’s identity. At the same time, this
mental suffering is frequently attributed a social or cultural basis, such as the systemic
privileging of heterosexuality, or norms of female bodily beauty. Yet, the solution
offered to all catfish is the same: affirming and accepting their authentic selves, rendering opaque and uncritiqued the structural inequalities that led them to catfish.
This therapeutic transposition of the social and political into the personal and individual points to the show’s convergence with critiques of reality television as “emblematic” neoliberal television (Woodstock 2014, 784). Neoliberalism has become a widely
used and somewhat amorphous concept in academic literature. Here, I use the term
specifically to conceptualize the ways in which certain economic rationalities have
come to permeate and shape discourses of selfhood and identity within popular media.
Several scholars have explored how reality programming produces subject positions
that are resilient, self-reliant, enterprising and “empowered,” and that can withstand
the “changing, uncertain, economic and political landscape[s]” naturalized through
neoliberalism (Woodstock 2014, 783–85; see also Couldry 2008; Ouellette and Hay
2008). One of the key insights of these collective analyses is, however, that reality TV
should not be conceptualized as circulating a unified and overarching neoliberal subject position. Rather, reality television has made legible a variety of different subject
positions, which speak to the dynamics of neoliberalism in different ways, tied to the
format specificities, imagined consumer or temporal moment of individual programs.
Catfish: The TV Show occupies a very specific position in the reality television
marketplace, a product of the MTV brand and aimed at a youth demographic. Indeed,
it is significant that, within the show, all of the catfish are young people, aged generally
between their mid-teens to early twenties. Although most scholarship on MTV has
focused on its broadcasting of music videos, the brand is also a prolific producer of
widely circulated, youth-targeted reality television (Middleton 2001). MTV has played
a crucial role in the cultural construction of youth subjectivities in the late twentieth
and early twenty-first centuries, producing in particular the notion that young people’s
senses of self-identity are more in the making than those of fully formed adults
(Middleton 2001). As Nancy Lesko (2012, 91) has explored, in Western culture, youth
is characterized as a time of transition, a period in which individuals undergo “emotional, social and cognitive changes.” Within popular discourses, young people are
frequently perceived to inhabit a kind of ontological “threshold” between childhood
and adulthood. It is therefore no coincidence that many MTV reality shows dramatize
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moments of transition in the lives of young people (e.g. 16 and Pregnant, My Super
Sweet 16), or offer interventions to address and resolve barriers to young people successfully transitioning into adulthood (e.g. Plain Jane, I Used to Be Fat).
In Catfish: The TV Show, the take-up of SNS use as an object of narrative scrutiny
becomes a core facet of MTV’s discursive making of contemporary youth subjectivities. In this show, a normative and successful transition into adulthood is associated
with particular kinds of self-representation on social media. Relatedly, the failure to
present oneself “authentically” is construed as a barrier to self-realization and the ability to move forward into adulthood as a fully realized individual. Catfishing is repeatedly evoked within the program as evidence of a stunted, immature, or childish
subjectivity. For instance, in Season 1, Episode 2, a friend of the catfishing victim,
Trina, proclaims of the catfish, “How can he deal with [talk to] someone and lie to
them for a whole year?” Trina replies, “Ask the men,” gesturing to Nev and Max, “let’s
get a man’s perspective.” Max interjects, “Girls do this too,” as Trina’s friend retorts,
“Girls do this. Not women. Women don’t do that.” To similar effect, in Season 1,
Episode 5, the catfish, Abbey, concludes her therapeutic discussion with Nev with the
words, “Time to grow up. Time to get over it.”
It is also highly significant that Catfish: The TV Show (and indeed the whole concept of the catfish) has emerged at a particular temporal moment in the life-cycle of
neoliberal capitalism, the post-2008 financial crisis. At this juncture, traditional
anchors of what Lauren Berlant (2011, 3) has called the “good life” of “upward mobility, job security, political and social equality, lively and durable intimacy” have become
increasingly out of reach for the millennial generation who are represented within and
addressed by Catfish: The TV Show (Silva 2013). The “fake” online personas created
by the catfish are, in almost every case, successful, glamorous, and wealthy individuals: models, rappers, pageant queens, and the like. In Season 2 Episode 2, Nev and
Max chat via webcam with the man whose images Framel had taken to construct his
fraudulent profile, a handsome nightlife promoter called Josh, who boasts 13,000 followers on this Facebook page, who states that his likeness is frequently used for catfish personas.
These visions of economic success are also conjoined with another kind of idealized image of the “good life”: monogamous romance and coupledom. As I noted previously, during the face-to-face confrontation, the catfish almost always maintains that
their romantic feelings for the victim were “real” and they do genuinely love them:
“Everything is real, I’m still the same person [inside]” (S1E2), “It was me and not me.
All the emotions, just a different face” (S1E5), and the catfish and their victim have
often discussed marriage and having children together. The catfish persona is thus
construed as an ambivalent entanglement of the real and the fake, designated as a
means of achieving, at least in disembodied, online form, fantasies of success defined
through wealth, popularity, and domestic partnership, which their “real” identities—
bound to vectors of sexuality, gender, race, body size, or economic status—appear to
have rendered unobtainable.
Jennifer Silva (2013, 7–8) has argued that in the context of “crisis” neoliberalism,
“drastic economic restructuring, profound cultural transformations, and deepening social
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215
inequality” have necessitated a “reimagining” of what it means to become an adult in
American culture. Central to this shift in the meanings of adulthood, Silva claims, is a
fixation with “emotions and psychic health” as the locus of stability, happiness, and
security, over external signifiers like a career, financial security, home ownership, or a
nuclear family (Silva 2013, 10). Discussing this same social context, Berlant (2011) has
argued that cultural texts have come to represent strategies for navigating such a climate
of intensified socio-economic precarity, which are often articulated in emotional or existential terms. Bringing Silva and Berlant’s arguments together in the context of Catfish:
The TV Show, we see that the mediation of SNS use through the reality televisual tropes
of emotion, confession, and therapeutic self-realization works to produce and disseminate strategies for making sense of what it means to be a youth subject “in a world where
taken-for-granted pathways to adulthood are quickly disappearing” (Silva 2013, 6). For
the young people who catfish, an image of futurity characterized by romantic coupledom, a nuclear family, and economic security must be given up. In its place, melded as
part of a “successful” transition into adulthood, is a future centered simply on a relationship with the authentic self. This relationship is positioned to bring happiness and fulfillment in emotional, if not material, terms, making legible a norm of youth subjectivity
that is resilient to, rather than critical of, the inequalities inherent to neoliberal precarity
that have disproportionately affected the young.
In this narrative, SNS is endowed with a profound significance as the means through
which this process of self-realization is both measured and enabled. Each episode of
Catfish: The TV Show concludes with a segment taking place, or so the onscreen text
maintains, a year after the events of the episode’s main narrative. Nev is shown communicating via Skype call with the (now former) catfish, who asserts that he or she has
deleted his or her false SNS profile and relinquished one’s catfishing ways to work on
being one’s authentic self, and is much happier for it. As Abbey, the catfish of Series 1
Episode 5 proclaims, beaming into the webcam, “I’ve had time to focus on how I feel
about myself, and I have more self-esteem. Things are changing, and I’m changing.”
Conclusion
This article has sought to make two primary interventions. First, I have argued that the
imperative toward “authentic” self-representation as a norm of social media usage is,
in large part, produced by the cultural scripts about social media that are constructed
and circulated in so-called old media texts. Catfish: The TV Show is emblematic of this
process, sculpting and disseminating discursive and disciplinary indexes of “good”
and “bad” SNS use thorough the tropes and conventions embedded within reality television programming. In particular, the show’s insistent valorization of connecting with
and realizing one’s “authentic” self delineates catfishing as the ultimate “aberrant”
social media practice, symptomatic of a fractured and imperiled subjectivity in need of
therapeutic resolve. In this way, the concept of the catfish, as represented in Catfish:
The TV Show, functions as an Internet “myth” in Stefik’s (1997) terms, a discursive
archetype which works to shape the ways in which social networking platforms come
to be used, through existing epistemological norms of self and subjectivity.
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Second, I have argued that the take-up of social media as a narrative focus in
Catfish: The TV Show is central to the program’s exemplification of the permeation of
neoliberal ideologies into everyday life and culture, far beyond the domains of formal
politics and economics (Woodstock 2014). In this show, SNS use circulates as a narrative fabric in which are woven broader ideals of subjectivity that speak in particular to
the dynamics of youth identity in the contemporary juncture of “crisis” neoliberalism.
Of course, the deliberate aim of the program is no doubt simply to generate commercial
capital, appealing to MTV’s youth demographic by capturing a zeitgeist in which SNS
have become a ubiquitous mode of interpersonal communication, and integrating this with
the established tropes of reality TV. Yet, the amalgamation of reality TV, SNS, and youth
identity within this text makes legible, as a cultural by-product, a subject position in which
traditional, material, and romantic markers of success take second place to a less tangible
relationship with the self. This forms, in Berlant’s (2011) terms, an “affective rhythm of
survival,” a kind of ontological strategy for navigating a climate of naturalized precarity for
the millennial generation, which diffuses the possibility of critique or challenge of the everdeepening inequalities of the political present.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article: The research for this article was funded by an Arts and Humanities
Research Council Doctoral Studentship.
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Author Biography
Michael Lovelock is a PhD candidate in the School of Art, Media and American Studies at the
University of East Anglia. His research explores issues of identity (particularly queer identity)
in relation to reality TV, digital media, and celebrity culture, and has been published in European
Journal of Cultural Studies and Journal of Gender Studies.
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