Oh fragile social media! You fickle friend! The new layout in Facebook means the regular posts upon Crushing Snails don’t get seen by everyone because their news feed may be busy. We’ve had a similar issue on the 72 Hour Movie site which we use to arrange meet-ups and people didn’t hear about it. Whilst it is primarily frustrating, it is secondly a failure in function?! That was one of the principle purposes of social media, to be able to communicate horizontally without the needs of traditional broadcasting? Now we seem to have gone full circle whereby, there is SO MUCH news in your news feed, that the only sure-fire chance that you are going to get to hear about things without missing it, is if it is in the mainstream media.
It’s noticeable within the site statistics, where many referrals come from Facebook to Crushing Snails. The impressions figure on Facebook (which documents the number of times that a story appears in someone’s news feed) has dropped from the 100+ to around 20. That is a huge number of people simply not getting the information. It makes you wonder what else you might be missing! It’s frustrating when trying to form a community also, because you need to formulate new ways for people to get the information.
There’s been quite a lot of changes to Facebook and Google recently and I’m not sure everyone is convinced that they are for the better. The internet was about diversity and the freedom to find and promote whatever interests you, and put you into direct communication with people that shared your interests elsewhere in the WORLD. Slowly we morphed into using Facebook to catalogue our existing friends from the real world and now we aren’t even getting all their details any more because the news feed maybe too busy to update about everyone.
If you haven’t read ‘You Are Not A Gadget’ by Jaron Lanier, I recommend it to you. It was a huge inspiration for Crushing Snails. The idea that we are flattening and homogenizing our cultures is not new to people. You can’t buy gifts in countries anymore as it is increasingly hard to find things you can’t find elsewhere. But these little snails, all misshapes and homemade, they represent the way we used to make things, that carry a different value from the price tag in the shop.
