Online dating is ubiquitous in today’s age. Whether connecting through online mutuals or using dedicated dating platforms, relationship encounters mediated by online platforms have increased exponentially.
In online romance, we as users, whether actively seeking connection or merely presenting ourselves attractively on our social media, engage in complex impression management behavior, choosing strategically how to construct and communicate our “self” digitally.
This management has been taken to an extreme, with users on romantic sites creating false accounts, using invented information and another person’s pictures for various motivations. The word for this has been coined as “Catfishing” as per the 2010 documentary Catfish.
The concept of impression management as discussed by Goffman’s position in ‘Communications as Interaction’, simultaneously doubts the existence of a “self” outside of a constructed identity established through several communicative filters and calls out the double-sidedness of humans. One side calculating and the other sacred, we as humans hide behind our “face” to manage a fluid identity.
As mentioned by Haziq, the face you choose to exhibit on the frontstage of your life guarantees positive social value and benefits. This shows the importance of impression management in online dating. Whilst never having to engage in face-to-face interaction, you can fabricate the impression you want to give of yourself, « 80% of daters misrepresent aspects of themselves, with men lying about height and income and women lying about age and weight. » (Knafo, 2021) In some cases, you might even invent a profile from scratch to improve your prospects.
The limitations of Garfinkel’s ideas on moral interactionism, these invisible rules of conduct that one follows in everyday interactions to maintain a feeling of mundanity, are stretched to a limit in the online realm. As a relatively new playing field, there is no standard code for safe interaction online, leading to many being duped into a false sense of safety. The online self is fluid, and changeable with a click, changing locations, appearance, and gender, allowing fluidity and double ‘faced-ness’. The psychological effect of this surge in power over one’s impression management has led to using the internet as an alternate reality.
« An analysis of 57 Catfish TV episodes found that 24% of catfish pretended to be a different gender … 9% pretended to belong to a different racial background » (Knafo, 2021). Most catfishes don’t have criminal intent but seek to remove barriers to their romantic happiness by constructing new online identities. The added layer of anonymity provided by online platforms facilitates meticulous control over one’s impression to others.
To conclude, the significance of impression management of the online self in romantic digitally mediated interactions has led to escapism, with individuals reinventing themselves to enhance their chances of finding love. Catfishing has also been used criminally, violating the unspoken agreement of genuine interest in romantic connection. The question is how to navigate the online dating field while protecting yourself against frauds. Are catfishes simply smarter at playing the impression management game?
Bibliography
Couldry,N. & Hepp,A.(2017) The Mediated Construction of Reality. Cambridge: Polity [See section 2.3 Media and the Communicative Construction of the Social World]
Haziq, S. (2019) Putting the best digital self forward in the age of Social Media Medium Available at: https://medium.com/@haziqsabreen25/putting-the-best-digital-self-forward-in-the-age-of-social-media-d3dbec422b73 (Accessed: Nov 4)
Knafo, D. (2021), ‘ Digital Desire and the Cyber Imposter: A Psychoanalytic Reflection on Catfishing’ , Psychoanalytic Dialogues, 31 (6), pp. 728-743. Available at : DOI 10.1080/10481885.2021.1976187(Accessed: Nov 4)
Netflix (2018) Sierra Burgess Is A Loser Official Trailer (HD) Netflix. 11 July. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9Pk_Eq4BUc (Accessed: Nov 4)
Scannell, P. (2007). Media and Communication. London: Sage. ‘Chapter 6: Communication as interaction: Goffman and Garfinkel, USA, 1950s-1970s’ (pp.145-168)
Universal Pictures ( 2010) Catfish- Trailer. 5 August. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BuE98oeL-e0 (Accessed: Nov 4)
Vanman, E. (2018) It’s not about money: we asked catfish why they trick people online The Conversation Available at: https://theconversation.com/its-not-about-money-we-asked-catfish-why-they-trick-people-online-100381 ( Accessed: Nov 4)
Ward, J. (2017), ‘What are you doing on Tinder? Impression management on a matchmaking mobile app’, Information, Communication & Society, 20 (11), pp. 1644- 1659. Available at: DOI 10.1080/1369118X.2016.1252412 (Accessed: Nov 4)
Williams, V.H. (2020), Catfishing and Online Identity Management, Alliant International University.
Your blog post on catfishing in online dating is very insightful! You talked about how people pretend to be someone else and they use fake names and pictures. You mentioned Goffman’s theory to explain how different we show different sides of ourselves to create a completely different person and real- world statistics support your point very well so 80% of people are lying about themselves which is such a huge number.
Overall, really good work!