The Hashtag

Ah, the hashtag. #. Pound sign. It means so much to us, but to a non-Gen-Y-er (or non-Twitter user) might mean nothing.

Uses of the hashtag

1. Categorization. The use of the pound sign (hashtag) for categorization was genius, and ultimately, what it was intended for. To be able to tweet an event, conference or international conversation under one name is brilliant. Mizzou Homecoming can be tweeted under the hashtag #MIZ100HC, Mizzou news can go under the hashtag #Mizzou, and news about a celebrity under his or her last name allows you to easily follow a story.

2. This brings us to the use of search relevance. If you are searching news and many have tweeted under the same hashtag, it's easier to find and more credible since one followed to general criteria enough to use the hashtag. Therefore, you have to make hashtags for corporate communication or international news something common enough that people won't change it up, misspell it or do anything else to make it less relevant.

3. Sarcastic attitudes have made the hashtag become a way of expressing one's opinion on something or overall commentary. This is where you start to wonder why it exists. If a tweet is already your opinion or shared knowledge, why not say what you mean? The # isn't supposed to imply sarcasm, so why have we turned it into that? I don't know about non-college towns, but it is pretty common to hear my friends and classmates use the word "hashtag" aloud.

• Hashtag, winning!
• Hashtag, awkward!
• Hashtag, too frat to care!

But what meaning does "hashtag" contribute to this? Absolutely nothing. And I'm guilty of this myself. What did we do before hashtag? Just SAID THOSE THOUGHTS! We have to remember that just because a cool symbol exists to categorize things doesn't mean we have to build its meaning and lose the originality of our comments by branding them to Twitter as a website.

4. Additional emphasis on your thoughts. If you're tweeting, you clearly have a sense of self-importance that outweighs that of those who don't tweet. You think that people actually care about what you're saying, at least enough to read it. That's why this last common usage of the hashtag cracks me up. People want to stress what they say in their tweets in this opinionated matter, using things like #mylife. Please note: I am guilty of this myself, but that doesn't mean I still can't find it funny. #sadday. What you said should have already implied that it's your life, or a sad day. You have 140 characters to get your point across, and you essentially have wasted one of them on a symbol. You really want EVERYONE to know that it's your takeaway point. Hence, we contribute to the #'s meaning by using it so often with the last emphasis tweets.


Therefore, I advise you to monitor usage of "hashtag" allowed and express your commentary in your words, not symbols. If we as a generation began to do this, we would not need signs, symbols and imagery to keep us going and could better define our writing and ourselves by what we say.