Catfish

“When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was ‘why would I want to put any information on the Internet at all?” – Mark Zuckerberg

As people wait eagerly for the opening of The Social Network this weekend (which I bet does pretty well given the broad appeal with Facebook’s 148 million users in the U.S.), I would like to bring yet another movie about the infamous, emerging Internet giant to your attention.  The movie is a quirky documentary called Catfish, which was the darling of the Sundance film festival recently due to its timeliness and recent successes of low-budget, documentary-style films with fantastic marketing campaigns such as Paranormal Activity.   A bidding war broke out over the first movie from filmmakers Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, which was ultimately purchased by Rogue Pictures in conjunction with Relativity Media and Universal Pictures.  I have feeling a second movie is in store for these two upcoming filmmakers.

I ran across the movie when I was in LA thanks to a guerilla marketing campaign on par with Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Cloverfield.  The documentary itself had a sort of Cloverfield or The Blair Witch Project feel to it.  However, unlike those two movies, Catfish was “not based on a true story” or “inspired by true events” it was simply “just true,” as part of the marketing campaign quipped.  The story, which is unconventional to say the least, had an equally unconventional marketing campaign.  I first heard about the movie through word-of-mouth, which was prompted by the uniqueness of both the movie and campaign.  Other parts of the campaign included “don’t let anyone tell you what it is” and “don’t watch the trailer, see the movie.”  Unfortunately, the marketing campaign didn’t leave much room for my friend to actually describe it.  This angered me so much that I immediately went online to read a review and ultimately buy a ticket.

In an effort to preserve the spirit of the movie, I won’t go into too much detail about it.  I have included a brief description from sfgate.com and the trailer below:

“It’s about a young New York photographer, Nev Schulman, who develops a Facebook relationship first with Abby, an apparently talented 8-year-old girl in Michigan who likes to send him paintings reproducing photos he took, and then with the girl’s 19-year-old half-sister, Megan, with whom he flirts. He soon begins talking to Megan by telephone.”

In other words, it is a relationship that blossoms between Nev and Abby’s family that would never take place without Facebook.  At the core of this relationship is trust, which is representative of the Facebook phenomenon.  Facebook has brought to the mainstream trust and personalization on the Internet.  People saw this potential from the beginning as evidenced by chat boards, IM, etc., but people always remained a little skeptical.  This is understandable given the fact the Internet is a robust, cost-efficient universal communication platform.  The problem is one of a tragedy of the commons whereby it is overrun by those with the strongest short term incentives (i.e. scammers, profiteers, marketers, etc).

I think this may be Facebook’s biggest trick, and one that all of us (companies and individuals alike) can benefit from.  It is quite amazing that the Internet is now a more trustworthy medium than telephone or mail, which have been around for a hundred years or more.  This week my girlfriend’s mother is visiting from South Africa.  Before now, I had never met her in person, spoken on the phone or sent as much as a message.  We had become ‘friends’ on Facebook a long time ago so I could share pictures of Jo, etc.  Jo and her mother were on separate airlines, but scheduled to arrive at the same time.  In an unexpected turn of events, my girlfriend missed her flight and had to stay in NYC overnight, although mom made hers as scheduled.  So there mom was in flight across the country with no phone (or Facebook) now to be unexpectedly picked up by a person she had never met.  Although I didn’t have any problem recognizing her (since she looks just like her beautiful daughter), it certainly made me feel a bit better about the situation knowing we were ‘Facebook friends.’

This was my take away from  Catfish, and perhaps more interesting than whether Hollywood’s interpretation of Mark Zuckerberg and Silicon Valley is fair or not.  Humans are wired to communicate and connect with people.  Regardless of whether you love Catfish or hate it, it is an eerie and powerful reminder of how the Internet is shaping the world around us and impacting real people in real ways.