This response will pay particular attention to the blog post “Harnessing the Power of #Hashtag”. This post was a very interesting and straightforward response to Mejia’s chapter on “Computers as Socializing Tools”. This post focusses on the implications of Hashtags in modern social media, paying particular attention to Twitter. This post describes various benefits that hashtags offer social media users.
I really enjoyed how the post divulged into how hashtags served as a “beautifully simple way to sort through and classify information on a particular topic”. I strongly agree with this, as hashtags truly make information on a certain topic easily accessible to everyone, as they organize the information into particular categories. Also, I agree that the small percentage of mistypes in hashtags are a small price to pay for all of the benefits that tagging can create. In my opinion, when most people use hashtags, they are careful to use the exact wording as the original hashtag.
The argument that hashtags help to bridge the gap between celebrity and “regular folks”is another intriguing point. Although this is true that hashtags enable everyone to have their tweets or posts categorized in the same place, it is very hard for a hashtag about a non-celebrity function to get much traction. So in my eyes, hashtags do not strongly help the celebrity/regular folk divide.
Also, I believe that photo tagging is a very important topic in the field of social media information exchange. The ability to make oneself known and tagged in someone else’s photo is a very helpful resource enabling people to widen their net of people who can view their photos.
The world of tagging and hashtags truly do serve as simple and efficient resources that enable information to be effectively categorized and spread.
http://media02.hongkiat.com/quicktips/fb-tagging.jpg