Catfish. If you are a 60-year-old man with a hobby of fishing then you are immediately picturing yesterday’s catch of the day. Well, this generation has an entirely different concept for the word “catfish,” and it has absolutely nothing to do with the whiskered fish. The word today can be defined as someone who pretends to be a different person by creating a false online profile and pursuing romantic relationships with other people online.

“I think people who create fake online profiles just want to meet people, but they’re scared to be themselves so they just make up profiles and have online relationships,” said Lisa Bent, a junior at DePaul University.

Catfish has quickly become a topic that is swirling around both social and traditional forms of media all because of a documentary that quickly gained notoriety.

In 2010, a documentary film was released titled “Catfish,” directed by Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman. This film gained recognition because it features Schulman’s brother, Nev Schulman, on a quest to meet the girl he had been communicating with online.

But this movie was not a low-budget sequel to “You’ve Got Mail,” as the documentary showed the reality of Nev Schulman falling in love online with a woman and her family he had never met and the disappointment he endured when he found out the girl of his dreams was not who she said she was.

Nev Schulman had been “catfished.”

After the success of the documentary, Schulman received hundreds of emails from people who found themselves in the same situation. All of these emails told the same story: I am in love with this guy or girl online, but every time we try to meet, it never ends up happening. Can you help me?

Nev Schulman decided he could help these people and partnered up with MTV to create “Catfish: The TV Show.” The show, which airs Monday nights on MTV, shows Schulman trying to connect people with their online relationship partners, who they have never met. However, just like Schulman’s experience, the show reveals a lot more “catfished situations” than it does success stories.

Lena Bent has some experience in the online relationship world, she has friends whom she talked to online but has never met face-to-face.

“I think that you still know them, even if you haven’t met in person and only talk online, it’s still a person being his or herself, at least in my experience,” said Bent.

While Bent has not come across any catfishing, the catfish that was heard around the U.S. was the scandal surrounding Manti Te’o, a linebacker at the University of Notre Dame. Te’o had mentioned his alleged girlfriend, Lennay Kekua, in a variety of interviews with ESPN. However, the two had never actually met as their relationship was based on Facebook, text messages and phone calls. News recently broke that Kekua’s profile was fake and was actually being run by a man named Roniah Tuiasosopo.

DePaulUniversityjunior Maggie Adams believes that the Te’o scandal was not a hoax, but a real life catfish.

“He (Te’o) is not that attractive and seems awkward, so I can see him looking for a relationship online, and him being a Notre Dame football player, people might want to mess with him,” said Adams.

Schulman told MTV that he was actually contacted back in December by Donna Tei, the woman whose picture was being used in Kekua’s profile, because Tei suspected that her photos were being used in the fake profile.

Schulman told MTV that catfishing is very common and the Te’o situation proves that “it can and obviously does happen to anyone.”