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What Is Catfishing Affect An Individual's Identity?

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Every day individuals are faced with countless decisions that have the opportunity to change their lives forever. These decisions can be larger such as career options or they can be seemingly insignificant ones such as choosing what kind of shoes to wear for the day. Although such a wide variety of judgements are made each day, there is a highly influential platform that is often overlooked. The daily decisions that are made online are perhaps the most significant towards how one’s identity is shaped. As technology has changed over time, the everyday use and purpose of it has also seemed to evolve. While the internet is often used solely in search of information, it has quickly become a platform for individuals to “recreate” themselves through …show more content…

The internet has become that of a new world as it has quickly changed over the years. To everyone who has used the internet this “new world” can look like a number of different things. A rapidly increasing outlook for the internet’s purpose is the world of catfishing. Catfishing, in accordance to Merriam Webster dictionary, describes “a person who sets up a false personal profile on a social networking site for fraudulent or deceptive purposes” (Merriam Webster). Catfishing can be seen as another way for an individual to recreate themselves online for the sheer reason to accomplish what they see as their “ideal” selves. This time eliminating the possibility of their “real” selves being revealed in any. According to Technology Journalist David Baker of BBC News, the internet “has given us a way to re-engineer our identity almost continually and discover what it is like to be someone very different from our ‘real’ selves.” With catfishing, the idea of discovering what it can be like to be portrayed as someone else is taken to the extremes. In this sense, it is much easier for an individual to mold their online personas and hide behind their ideal selves. This leaves the gate wide open for the endangerment of that individual’s personal identity to change alongside their fake online …show more content…

Forever. This factor is a large portion in one’s online identity that can possibly alter or change their personal identity. Author for Psych Central, Rick Nauert, explores this idea in detail and claims “…what an individual says and does online influences everyday relationships and behavior” (Nauert) in the real world. If what Nauert is implying reigns true, then the personal identity shift that takes place affects not only the individual whose identity is in question, but also those who are in close relation to

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