By Trent Colledge
Image Credits: Bluetie.com_Hashtag_Compilation
Let's all stop and think for a moment. What is one of the most common things we use on social media these days without thinking about it? That's right - the one and only "hashtag". Sure, the pound symbol has always been around, but it's now become something more in the grand scheme of social media. It's almost become a language of it's own. Sometimes you can hear people in the real world saying "hashtag cute!" when a girl shows off her new outfit (I know it's not a great example, but I'm not used to using hashtags, alright?).
But it does things; if you think about it, it connects people, in more ways than one. People use it as a form of language, sure, but more importantly, it's primary purpose is to connect people to things they are searching for, or to provide news or information on something, almost like a search engine. In a recent news story, and one that's been going on for a while I might add, the "free the nipple" campaign made news because a man named James Shamsi made a stand against the social networking site Instagram, as Emma Gray at the Huffington Post reports.
But that's not even scratching the surface of what I wanted to talk about, so let's get down to it. Hashtags have become a language that connects people in a network, and a lot of the time (depending on how people use them), they can tell a story behind their posts on sites like Facebook. Someone can use a certain hashtag to put emphasis on their feelings or thoughts behind their Facebook post or photo; the hashtags are "reflecting the ways the author sees, visualizes, and experiences the real world" (Kuttaninen, 2015), much like a story.
But you know what? That's still not enough for me. Have you ever heard of the songlines? I hadn't until recently. Turns out they're very interesting. Songlines were ways that the Aboriginals of Australia mapped their way around, a network of sorts. It is said that the a song "was both a map and direction finder" (Chatwin, 1987). Now of course, that sounds like our favourite hashtags, finding our way around Facebook. What do you think? Agree? Disagree? Let me know!
References
Gray, E. (2015) How One Man Gamed Instagram To Show Support For #FreeTheNipple. Retrieved August 28, 2015 from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/how-one-man-tricked-instagram-to-show-support-for-freethenipple_55d74a40e4b0a40aa3aab1c7?section=australia&adsSiteOverride=au
Kuttainen, V. (2015) BA1002: Our Space: Networks, Narratives, and the Making of Place, Lecture 5: Stories and Places [PowerPoint Slides]. Retrieved on August 28, 2015 from http://learnjcu.edu.au
Chatwin, B (1987) The Songlines. Bedford Square, London. Jonathan Cape Ltd.
Image Credits
Honorat, S (2015) Hashtag Compilation. Retrieved from Bluetie.com_Hashtag_Compilation
#Agreed.
ReplyDeleteThe trend and popularity that the pound symbol has created has styled a booming effect on social media. This symbol has become extremely fashionable and has not only jumped out of the dark and made its way to being used tirelessly on Instagram but has also become desperately popular on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, through daily text messages and can even be seen throughout the media in today’s youthful society's advertisement. But where did the hashtag originate from? According to my source the hash tag was often used in information technology to “highlight a special meaning.” Foremost the question posed as to if the hashtag could somehow share a bond with the sacred Aboriginal songlines could be precisely true. Songlines were positioned onto a map to show where a sacred site or special meaning was. Thus alike to hashags, the symbol is put at the beginning of a word to emphasize the meaning.
References:
Hashtag, N.D. (2015) In Wikipedia. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashtag
I definitely agree with hashtags being a network of sorts, and fostering connections between people around the world based on the social media platforms that they are involved in and the specific topics that they are interested in. Hashtags have become so commonplace on not only most forms of social media but also in everyday face-to-face conversations that I found myself unfazed when, whilst watching an episode of The Bachelor, I heard one of the women describe an incident as "#uncomfortable". However, when I consider the effect hashtags have had on the English language, I find myself agreeing with an article on Gizmodo.com, in the sense that because hashtags are being used so liberally nowadays, they fail to fulfil their original purpose of connecting people and information (Biddle, 2011).
ReplyDeleteReferences:
Biddle, S. (2011). How the Hashtag is Ruining the English Language. Retrieved on August 29, 2015 from http://gizmodo.com/5869538/how-the-hashtag-is-ruining-the-english-language