Hashtag 101

HashTags 101


Unless you have been living in a cave for the last 10 plus years then social media has become integrated in your life in some type of way. Whether it is Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google Plus, Tumbler, Instagram, Flickr, etc. it has introduced you to a completely new way of interacting with people and gathering information. Unfortunately sometimes what’s new doesn’t necessarily make complete sense when you first see it. This is where the Hashtag comes into debate. You may ask yourself “What’s a hashtag?”, I asked myself the same thing when I saw the pound key with words following it suddenly start showing up on my Twitter account and Facebook wall. The hashtag is simply accepted ignorance and the demise of using complete sentences as we know it.
During my research I found several versions of the hashtags origin. Ranging from the punctuation mark on the touch tone telephone system of the 1970’s, to the transfer from Internet Relay Chat which inspired Chris Messina to transfer it to Twitter. With the question of how and why still lingering I went to Urban Dictionary which defines the hashtag as a simple way for people to search for tweets that have a common topic and to begin a conversation. It is believed to have originated through Twitter because that’s the first time anyone can track it being used purposely, but it was not an original function for the website. When the 2009 plane went down in the Hudson River some random user tweeted (posted on twitter) a message and added “#flight1549” to the end. This was followed by several individuals doing the same as information was acquired about the incident. Within a couple of hours instead of searching for precise information on the subject you could just search “#flight1549” and see everything that had been written on the subject. Now that we have an idea of what the hashtag is we get to break down the good, bad and ugly of allowing a symbol to replace actual conversation.
Since its origin the...