Catfish

Materiality, according to Critical Terms for Media Studies, "serves as a commonsensical antithesis to, for instance, the spiritual, the abstract, the phenomenal, the virtual, and the formal, not to mention the immaterial." In other words, Bill Brown, the writer of Materiality, believed materiality to be something physical, being able to acknowledge the look and feel of the object.  He gives the example washing a sweater, in which he exclaims it destroys the materiality of it by altering the sweater's physical quality.  He illustrates a link between the sense of touch as "privileged access to the physical" to the distinctions of what one can see and what one can change.  Critics have claimed that materiality of our human experience had been compromised to modernity, being carefree and innocent with the real.


I believe real to be the common definition of materiality, as mentioned in the book.  Being able to look and feel the object in person defines it to be "real".  However, adding emotions into the mix makes it harder to distinguish whether something is real or not.  Things that are virtual may not necessarily mean fictional, but it correlates to the nonexistent physicality of it.  It can mean a different version of a life or object, created to meet the person's ideal state such as the game Second Life.


Catfish is an American documentary film involving a young man, Yaniv Schulman, who meets the Pierce family through an 8 year old girl and connects to the whole family through the social network, Facebook.  Abbey Pierce sends Yaniv a painting of one of his published photos.  Yaniv's brother and friend decide to film the relationship between Yaniv and Abbey's family.  He becomes romantically involved with Megan, Abby's 19 year old sister, developing a long distance relationship by telephone and over the internet.  The problem arises when Megan sends him samples of her music, in which Nev (Yaniv) discovers that the songs were taken from existing videos from YouTube.