In the third chapter of his book Off the Network: Disrupting the Digital World, Ulises Ali Mejias describes how computers function together to form a network, defined as “a system of linked elements or nodes” (37). Digital networks, Mejias writes, use a combination of human and machine to assume social agency through social tagging systems. The concept may seem abstract, but for anyone who uses social media such as Twitter in their daily lives, tagging works as a beautifully simple way to sort through and classify information on a particular topic.
Perhaps what makes Twitter hashtags so appealing to its users is the fact that it operates as a “folksonomy” with few, if any, rules for what can and can’t be a hashtag. The relatively lawless nature of hashtags comes from the fact that “the negotiation of meaning during the process of classification is delegated from humans to code” (50). Mejias portrays this feature as “perhaps [the] greatest weakness” of social tagging systems, but I argue that any inefficiencies caused by the computer regulating the system are far outweighed by their benefits.
Yes, it is somewhat annoying that the same topic could take on multiple hashtags based on a misspelling or the choice to omit “the,” as in the example below.
Two people tweeting about the same thing won’t have their tweets sorted into the same “pile” because of their slightly different hashtag choice, but the inefficiency is minor and ultimately insignificant. What makes Twitter hashtags so fascinating is how they can provide a seamless link between celebrities and regular folks. When NASCAR driver Brad Keselowski—who has over 500,000 followers—wants to do an impromptu Q&A session with his fans, all he needs to do is harness the power of the hashtag, and computers handle the dirty work of aggregating all the submissions for him. In my view, it’s well worth a few small sacrifices in order to gain the “individual freedom and scale of access that only the internet can provide” (52).
alcuster
I agree that hashtags are a limited, but altogether powerful social networking device. They are something of a strange entity, since they function first to sort posts into groups based on topics, but in doing so also create a tenuous social network containing all who have used the same hashtag. Highly popular hashtags, like the name of a TV show (#TopChef, #TheVoice) or vague feelings (#love, #blessed) form massive pools of posts whose authors likely have not and will never spoken to one another – yet are now collected on the same webpage simply by merit of having written about the same thing. Such a network is fairly nebulous compared to, say, the one containing all of your Facebook friends, though I think it speaks a great deal to the power of posting things online as a social action. To use a hashtag is concede a substantial amount of individual anonymity in order to join a global conversation with a thousands or even millions of complete strangers. It’s a fascinating action, to say the least.
I’m glad you brought up the limitations of hashtags. Really, it’s kind of a “dumb” technology, compared to what else is out there. By “dumb” I mean that there typically isn’t any sort of check to ensure that people type a hashtag correctly, or that the content of their post actually aligns with the meaning of the tag. In other words, I could write up something about how “Evian” water spelled backwards is “Naive” and throw in the hashtag #BritainHasTalent (rather than #BritainsGotTalent) and Twitter/Facebook/Whatever won’t care to alert me that I’ve just marked my post with a hashtag that is both incorrect and entirely unrelated to the rest of my post.
Furthermore, hashtags only work well when they refer to things with only one possible meaning. My high school’s Facebook page often adorns posts with a hashtag of the school’s initials, USN. Unfortunately, these are the same three letters used to shorthand the abbreviate “United States Navy.” So, posts made about a small private high school in Tennessee are lumped together with those about America’s naval force, along with any other entity that happens to bear the same initials. Not too helpful. Then again, maybe the purpose of the hashtag isn’t doesn’t have much to do with its accuracy or the networks it creates, but rather its function(s) as a social action.