Shedding Light on Our Masks
******ATTENTION: this blog contains spoilers to the movie "searching"*******
I just saw this amazing movie. It was all filmed/shown only on a screen recording of computers and videos. It was about this dad whose daughter had gone missing. The movie shows how much media especially social media affects us and how peoples entire lives can be on a screen in front of them. In the movie, the perpetrator, a boy who has liked the girl since grade school, catfishes her to get to know her. This ultimately leads into him accidentally pushing her off a cliff where she is left for five days. This shows how media can "go from zero to a hundred, real quick" or escalated quickly. Catfishing is easy for anyone to do and the person behind it can be anyone from a boy who used to like you to a creepy old guy. The media is a mask that people can use to seem like someone else. The only difference between catfish and regular people is how much they make the mask look like them. It's a scary world out there, and as a teen, it sucks that I have to think about it.
Parents, teachers, literally everyone warns kids to be careful on the internet, because not everyone is always who they seem to be. Despite all the horror stories that are warped into cautionary tales, it is can be so tempting to have a relationship via the internet. I don’t necessarily mean romance, all I have experience with is internet friendships, but still. The internet is wonderful for meeting people who share your interests, and making seemingly really close friends is unbelievably easy. All I’m saying is, it’s much easier to scorn communicating with “strangers” on the internet if you’ve never done it before. I don’t mean to lecture you in particular or anything. I just wish people knew how internet relationships start, so they could be more understanding of why people enter them.
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