Is it really you?

Just as a side note before we begin I have been sitting pondering whether the plural of catfish is catfish or catfishes, I know that fish is the plural of fish and that fishes is grammatically incorrect but I have been wondering if grammar applies to neologisms.  That gives you a peek into the inner workings of my mind.  Anyway, moving on.

A catfish in the world of the Internet is a person who claims to be someone else online.  They use photos of other people, they borrow details from their lives, and depending on how determined the catfish is they might even stalk the person they are pretending to be to a point where they gain enough information to be able to pretend to be them.  One of the most common techniques I have seen used is documented by @TheCatfishFiles, a twitter account that has been pursuing one particularly persistent perpetrator [try saying that 10 times fast] - this technique is to basically find individuals who are on one social network but not on Twitter and then more or less mirror their posts, taking their pictures etc and tweeting them as their own.  The catfish files account documents the twitter accounts found to be pretending to be someone else, and cites the actual users on other social networks who they are pretending to be as sources.

There have been TV shows, and Movies, and countless article written online about this practice.  What I find interesting though is that although the term is relatively new, the concept itself is not.  The first time I used the Internet was when I was about 11 years old which would have been in late 1999 or early 2000.  I was shown how to use it by a friend of my Mum's as we had never had it before and Mum had never used it before.  Our first internet connection was via dial-up internet with a 28kbps connection, 56kbps if you were lucky but that was rare.  Comparing that with the 40mbps internet connection [40,000kbps] which is quite literally over 1,400 times faster gives you an idea of how far along technology has come in the last 18 or 19 years.  Nevertheless one of the first things I was told when I logged on for the very first time was that "nobody online is who they appear to be" - you can call that cynical if you want, but it is something that stuck with me from day one that I always kept in the back of my mind.

For many years I was reluctant to even use social networks, preferring to stay in direct contact with my friends.  It wasn't until University in 2006 that I finally gave in and started using social networks primarily because it was almost impossible to keep up to date with everyone who I had to interact with in University through other means.  A few years after I left University and no longer had need for it as I didn't speak to most of the people I was "friends" with on it anyway, I decided to axe most of them.

I'm still happy I made that choice.  Despite wondering at times what certain people are up to now, I preferred knowing who actually wanted to stay in touch with me, as I give people the means to do it and some did, others did not.  As the years have passed by, I have realised that my interactions with people online have become something of interest but not something that is a necessity.  I follow people now who I have an interest in, but not people that I "need" to follow out of some obligation to do so.  I feel that has led to much more meaningful connections and has resulted in me actually seeing content I care about and have an interest in.

The few years at University and those that followed where I went against my nature and gave in to using social networks the way others expected me to use them, taught me quite a few lessons about what other people actually want from you in life.  It made me acutely aware of how many people consider you a friend in name only but who you have never actually met, or rarely spoke to if ever.  It also made me aware that most family members that follow you and connect with you do so in order to keep an eye on what you are doing. 

The thing that annoyed me most of all though was the inescapable feeling that in almost every case, people wanted to use you as a source of entertainment.  They wanted to see a reality TV show which starred people that they actually knew which they could then talk about and ultimately judge.  I didn't like that one bit.  I made a conscious choice to become semi-anonymous online.  I deleted every profile I had on social media and created new ones on the sites I actually wanted to use.  The only sites that I still use are Twitter and sites related to gaming, neither of which actually require you to use your real name or give any specifics about who you are offline.

The point of doing all of this was to ensure that very few people that actually knew me would actually find me online, save for those select few who asked and I chose to share.  This meant that almost every single person I met online was someone who I did not know, who did not know me.  That was liberating.  I say semi-anonymous for the simple reason that I still use my real photo as a display picture and my real first name.  I just don't give any specifics about my life anymore and for the most part I don't ask for those from anyone else, and the vast majority of people I follow don't share that either.  There is of course an obvious age divide when it comes to people who I follow and who follow me - they are all around my age or older, i.e. they are people whose first experience with the Internet came at a time when it was normal not to share and bare your soul to the world online.

I find it interesting that people are so willing to impersonate others online, but I also find it interesting that people share so much information online that it actually becomes possible to do that.  If you wanted to pretend to be me you'd find that very hard; for a start there are very few pictures of me online, I don't post selfies and I hate using a camera.  I rarely change my display pictures on social media the ones I use now are all months or in some cases years old.

As a society I don't think catfish profiles in and of themselves are the biggest concern for anyone using social media, I think the real issue is the fact we're so willing to believe people are who they say they are, and that we share so much information that it becomes possible for other people to do that with us.  I've spoken about targeted advertising and the profiles that advertisers create based around the information we share that they scrape from the various sites we visit and the partners they pair with who share our information with them.  There comes a curious question when you consider the potential use of AI and behavioural modelling - at what point could an advertiser create an AI Agent that could not only predict what we would do but could live out a virtual life pretending to be us?

If you want to make this even creepier, there is actually an App called Replika, developed by Luka Inc which analyses the data that you feed it and creates a chat bot that you can talk to who it claims will be "your best friend" - the developer of Luka Inc, a woman named Eugenia Kuyda originally created the software as she wanted a way to talk to a friend of hers who died, the goal was to create an AI that would accurately represent her dead friend and allow her to talk to him once again.