TECH TUESDAY – Ah, the hashtag. Perhaps nothing separates us from our grandparents more than our generation’s rampant employment of this social media phenomenon.
Sure, your grandma can probably operate an iPad, but does she hashtag her tweets? Didn’t think so.
Regardless, before we continue, a brief explanation and history of the hashtag is in order for all the grandmas out there who might be reading this.
A hashtag is a word – or several words lumped together without spaces – that is written with the hash key or pound sign (this thing: #) in front of it. On social networks, most importantly Twitter and Instagram, hashtags are basically keywords that can be searched for, thus filtering media into discussion threads. The first widespread use of a hashtag is thought to be during the massive San Diego conflagrations of 2007, when folks used #sandiegofire to share information about the blazes. Hashtags were also widely used to categorize threads of dissent and organize protests during the 2009-2010 Iranian election protests and the Arab Spring in 2011. The hashtag hit its cultural zenith when it was named 2012 Word of of the Year by the American Dialect Society in January.
But, as all of us who do know what a hashtag is, they’re not always used for such noble causes as disaster and protest information dissemination. One of the most popular hashtags in recent memory is #fail, used to make fun of something that, well, failed. Other less than useful hashtags include #justsaying (of course you are), #fml (“Fuck My Life”), and #smd (I’ll let you look that one up).
And now, to the agony of linguists, hashtags have jumped from social media into the spoken vernacular. People are “hashtag tired” when they’ve been working too much or a waiter is a “hashtag” idiot” when he gets the order wrong. Teenagers exclaim “hashtag OMG!” when hearing of the latest news on Justin Bieber’s mental breakdown.
My question is: Is it only downhill from here for the hashtag? Is this quirky little tech phenomenon getting too mainstream and overused to be interesting/funny/relevant/cool any more?
Last year Twitter began monetizing the hashtag, allowing businesses to pay to have a promotional tag automatically show up as “trending” and thus seen and (hopefully) incorporated into tweets by tons of users. Surely, this must spell the end of the hashtag being organically cool. The most humorously uncool #fail of promoted hashtags so far occurred when #failed US Presidential candidate Mitt Romney paid to promote the tag #AreYouBetterOff to stir up internet chatter on Obama’s supposedly unsuccessful presidency. The move backfired in a major way though, as most people answered “yes” and roughly five times as many tweets with the hashtag were deemed to be mocking Mitt Romney than actually complaining about Obama.
Besides the hasthag’s uncool turn towards becoming profitable, there’s another fact that we must face: Lots of uses of the hashtag these days are getting pretty lame. There’s the unnecessarily-long-trying-to-be-funny hashtag: #EatingDinnerWithFriends or #ImReallyHavingABlast or #ThisWineIsReallyGood or #AboutToEatSomeHam. Then there are #people #who #hashtag #pretty #much #everything #in #their #tweets And, especially on Instagram, there are those that employ dozens of hashtags on every photo in a vain and desperate effort to get as many likes as possible. (Full disclosure: We do this on our Coconuts Bangkok and Coconuts Manila Instagram accounts.)
But I have a feeling the hashtag will stick around for at least a while longer. In fact, Facebook, the mother of all social media, is reportedly working on bringing the hashtag function to the newsfeeds of its one billion plus users around the globe. This would obviously only further solidify the hashtag’s importance as a tool for the social media generation.
And hey, for all that we rip on hashtags, they’ve served some pretty cool purposes in recent memory too. During the Great Thailand Floods of 2011, Twitter users employed #thaiflood (for Thai) and #thaifloodeng (for English) to share information and media on the rapidly incoming floodwaters, and #RescuePH and #FloodsPH were used during the Manila floods of 2012. Twitter became the go-to source for the latest news on the floods, more so than TV or the radio, and people were rescued in both countries from tweets sent out with these hashtags that may not have been found otherwise.
As annoying as it can be sometimes, the hashtag has become a very real and indispensable tool for the social media generation – a tool that sometimes has very real applications for good. And that’s pretty cool.
Yes, it’s a hashtag life for us.
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Tech Tuesday: Whereby Coconuts explores the digital world through a local lens.
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