Plenty of (cat)fish in the sea: when your fake ID is a digital one

I’ll be the first to admit that I pay little attention to mainstream sports and their culture: football is the only TV broadcast that makes me excited for the commercial break.  However, a recent revelation involving football, the Internet, AND ichthyology metaphors has caught a nation’s attention…

The story so far: Manti Te’o, Notre Dame linebacker and Heisman trophy runner-up, led his team to a 20-3 victory versus Michigan State after the near-simultaneous deaths of his grandmother and his long-distance girlfriend.  The latter, Stanford student Lennay Kekua, had reportedly succumbed to cancer: the couple had known each other for years, and often talked on the phone.   Recently, the sleuths of Deadspin.com found no official record of Kekua’s birth or Stanford enrollment. To complicate matters, the best-known photo of her is actually that of a woman who is very much alive and very much nonplussed that she has become the face of a dead girl who never actually lived.  Long story short, it was all a hoax.  Either Te’o was completely hoodwinked by a cyber-impostor, or he fronted with a sob story to win Americans’ hearts and now the triumph-over-tragedy jig is up.  Either way, it kind of sucks to be him right now.

If Kekua didn’t answer Te’o’s calls and tweets, who did?  Surprisingly (or not), 22-year-old Ronaiah Tuiasosopo, a “catfish” who “killed off” his female alter ego after (get this) finding out that Te’o had Skyped with several “other” women.  So we know that the relationship had some real-life feelings attached.

A person like Tuiasosopo—one who lies about his or her identity online—is known as a catfish.  The term comes from the titular 2010 movie in which—well, I’ve never seen it, but apparently someone puts catfish in a cod barrel to keep the latter ichthyoids on the move during shipping.  Thus, a “catfish” is someone who keeps you guessing, as does a close confidante or companion whom you’ve never actually met.  Naturally, MTV has made the phenomenon into a reality TV show in which people search for their cyber-loves in real life, often finding that they’ve been deceived.

Why do people do this to themselves?  And why didn’t Te’o get suspicious?  And also, why did Tuiasosopo string along Te’o (if that’s really what happened) for two years?  Even if Kekua wasn’t real, it sounds like the feelings were, at least on her creator’s end.  Kekua’s “death” was a result of a disagreement over the fact that Te’o had Skyped several ex-girlfriends; Tuisasosopo has admitted his own emotional investment in Lennay and self-identifies as someone trying to “recover” from homosexuality.  So even if the joke is on Te’o, the jokester is hardly proclaiming the success of his ruse as a victory.

Why do people pretend to be someone else?  Truth is, in some ways, the Internet is sort of a social batting cage—you can try out certain interactions without the emotional risk of real-life rejection; in other words, it can be a testing ground for relationships and perspectives of all varieties.  Everything from Reddit trolls to fake dating profiles is a means of gauging social actions and reactions.  Honestly, it’s part of the beauty of the Internet: that if the going gets tough, you can always log out.  Just remember that there’s a human being on the other end as well.

And if you meet someone online?  Maybe just Google him or her first—not to find out everything about them, but rather to make sure that her or she does, in fact, exist.