What do you think about catfish? I happen to be a fan and I just found another reason.
Apparently, to keep cod alive as they make the transatlantic trip from one coast to another, the people who are in charge of these kinds of things put catfish in with the cod to keep the cod active. Otherwise, the cod gets lazy. The catfish nip at their tales, keep them active, cause them to keep moving and keep living.
A few weeks ago, we made the decision to go see one of the Facebook movies as a team. I would pay for the experience and we would write it off under “talent education”.
We had two choices – The Social Network or the “real” Facebook movie called Catfish. Given that we all have a propensity towards art instead of greed, we chose the latter.
We just returned from the movie. There was some post-movie banter in the company minivan as we returned to the office. The one thing we all greed upon was that the point the movie made about catfish was relevant and important. If you’re lucky or blessed or both – you’ve had a catfish or two in your life. I’ve had so many I can’t even count – and a few ridiculously important catfish too. There are several in recent years who have made a life altering difference for me as they nipped and pushed and didn’t give up on me or let me give up on myself.
I’ve also been a catfish. Ask anyone who has had the pleasure of my catfish ways and you’ll know that I don’t give up easily. I keep nipping at those tail fins through the whole journey encouraging the cod I’ve been entrusted with to see it to the end. The world needs more catfish.
The other part of the movie was about the illusion of online relationships. Nell Minnow, aka Movie Mom reviewed it better than I can write it “There are two reasons online attachments get intensely personal so quickly. The first is the capacity of the internet to connect you to the one other person in the world who cares as passionately as you do about not just pineapple pizza but pineapple pizza with pesto-encrusted pineapple slices and fontina cheese. That connection is so immediately validating that you can’t help feeling that whatever else you have in common is enormously significant and whatever you don’t doesn’t matter. The second reason is that online communication is like a Rorschach test; we project onto all the empty spaces all the things we subconsciously want to see there, unable to realize how much of what we see comes from our own minds. Which brings me to a third reason – they work because we want them to. They are the perfect fantasy relationship, creating the illusion of intimacy without the risk because we have control over what we send back. Until we don’t, when it stops working and fantasy relationships lead to real-life heartbreak.” Read more: http://blog.beliefnet.com/moviemom/2010/09/catfish.html#ixzz12Az7MFZj
I am on the same page with Nell. Social network relationships can be deceptive and “where there is deception, there is no relationship.”
For those of us who are in charge of helping to design and craft a dialogue online in social networking communities, we must lead with authenticity, transparency and trust. We need to represent our world and our businesses as they are – not as we wish they were or as we imagine them to be. Even in the movie, they discover the beginning of the truth with a few clicks of the button. The consumer can easily research anything in nano-seconds about your brand. Better be able to back up what you say online.
The movie left us all feeling a little conflicted. Unlike the Disney movies we grew up with and most movies for that matter – it didn’t tie up nice and neat. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but real lives very rarely tie up nice and neat either. People are complex. Lives are complex. Life is not a Disney movie. It takes more heart, more courage, more soul, more compassion, and more love than a Disney movie can even begin to wrestle up.
Catfish, the movie, shines a light on the world we live in and it might even help each of us in this fantasy age to think about things differently. As we get closer to the people in our lives, we find out the compassionate honest to goodness truth. While it may not always be as we had imagined, we can appreciate the beauty of the truth.
– LG