News location:

Canberra Today 15°/18° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Griffiths / From the dawn of the internet: hashtags

HASHTAGS keep popping up in ever more various places so it behooves us to swim at least a little against the tide of ignorance and explore what they are, and why Canberra Raiders player Blake Ferguson came to have #YOLO tattooed on his hand (You Only Live Once, the hashtag of choice for people about to do something stupid).

John Griffiths
John Griffiths.
Music teachers are even reporting students asking them how to play “G hashtag” having seen G# written down.

Even the usually reliable Urban Dictionary (based on what its users feel something means) is hopelessly off-beam on this one, fortunately just this June the “Oxford English Dictionary” has cleared things up somewhat (as above).

Hashtags were born in the dim, dark dawn of the internet when nerds clustered on a service called Internet Relay Chat (IRC) and hopefully asked if any of the other chatters were women.

After the first million or so users logged on, ways to break the conversation up by interest area (Star Wars or Star Trek?) became essential, and sweaty fingers would clunk out “join #StarTrek” into the text-based interface.

There are still a great many ageing IRC users furiously agreeing with each other on their mostly forgotten channels that IRC does everything Twitter does and more.

Twitter made things so simple any idiot could use it, and so of course any idiot did.

With the # symbol so rarely used (and even more rarely with letters) it makes for a unique search string. This is handy when you’re trying to see what people are saying about a subject with minimal work.

The problem, of course, is getting a diverse group of people in multiple time zones and languages to use the same nomenclature, particularly in an evolving crisis.

It works reasonably well for the ABC’s “Q and A” program (although following the torrential raw #qanda feed on Monday nights does not leave much attention spare to actually watch the show).

#actpol (ACT Politics) and #Canberra are channels where there is some chance someone somewhere is actually watching (possibly not for any benign purpose) and the ad agencies being paid to push Canberra’s “brand” desperately hope a normal person will one day use #CBR.

However, for the most part it’s just used by idiots as a weird form of parenthetical writing.

#worstdayever is not tweeted in the hope that the waiting throng watching #worstdayever search results on Twitter (or other social media) will burst into applause and tell the tweeter how funny, smart, and sexy they are (no matter how fervently this is wished for).

The misused hashtag resembles nothing so much as the colossal bore at a party shouting “everybody listen to me” because the rest of the party-goers have, up to that point, been managing to ignore them.

In a rare case, in which Twitter is better than real life, at least one can quietly mute them and get back to more interesting conversations.

However, the scourge marches on into more regular discourse. Just this week an astroturfer (fake grass roots) caught red handed in the “CityNews.com.au” comments section called me a “(#creep)” for daring to notice her IP address and email addresses were identical over multiple user names.

John Griffiths is the online editor of citynews.com.au

Who can be trusted?

In a world of spin and confusion, there’s never been a more important time to support independent journalism in Canberra.

If you trust our work online and want to enforce the power of independent voices, I invite you to make a small contribution.

Every dollar of support is invested back into our journalism to help keep citynews.com.au strong and free.

Become a supporter

Thank you,

Ian Meikle, editor

Share this

Leave a Reply

Follow us on Instagram @canberracitynews