Two students in my graduate seminar sent me this Jimmy Fallon clip yesterday. It’s pretty funny. But this isn’t a post about Fallon and Timberlake. It’s a post about a brief rant a subjected my class to earlier this semester. It’s about my brewing hashtag-rage.
About a month ago, I was reading Twitter at home and stumbled across a run-of-the-mill baseball post. It was something like “wow, what a #great #catch! Go team! #Nationals.” The writer has turned a simple statement into cluttered word salad. It’s obnoxious, and it leaves me annoyed.
Companies on Twitter do this constantly as well:
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@NewDay is, apparently, a program on CNN. If you click on the #NewDay hashtag, you’ll find a mix of reporters and staff involved with the show, along with a bunch of people tweeting about how their alarm clock didn’t go off this morning. Click on the #Thursday hashtag, and you’ll find people talking about Thursday. Click on the #Bono hashtag, and… well, you get the picture.
The extra # symbols pollute the message. It helps convince people that Twitter is stupid. But Twitter isn’t stupid, they’re just using it in a stupid manner.
I can think of exactly four good reasons to use a hashtag:
1. There are a few stable communities that organize an ongoing conversation through hashtags. #TCOT (Top Conservative On Twitter) is the best example. Want to reach the conservative political community? Use #TCOT. Plenty of them will see it.
2. Sometimes there will be a public event/media event that causes an online conversation to erupt. After the Navy Yard shooting last week, people started monitoring social media to get updates. #NavyYard is sensible and appropriate.
(Let me pause for a moment. The difference between these two cases and “#Great #Catch…” is that a community is, in fact, monitoring the hashtag. No one monitors the conversation around “#Great” or “#Thursday!” The function of a hashtag is to alert people who are having a conversation around the same topic. Attending the American Political Science Association conference? Go ahead and use #APSA2013 so other attendees can read you’re witticism. But don’t write “#political,” “#science” unless you desperately want everyone to judge you.)
3. Providing context. During the Emmys on Sunday night, I doubt many people were monitoring the #Emmys conversation stream. It would be too big and too full of repetitive comments from people who you don’t know or care about. But if you’re watching the Emmys and want to make a Jon-Stewart-was-robbed comment, adding #Emmys to the end can provide context for readers who are engrossed in Sunday Night Football, forget that the Emmys is on that night, and otherwise will be left wondering what you’re talking about.
4. Humor. Hashtags can be great for jokes. They can act like Stephen Colbert’s “the Word” segment, calling out the subtext or irony of the statement you just made. They can also promote hashtag games.
Notice, these third and fourth cases apply hashtags to offer context within-message , rather than to bridge your message to a broader community. That’s fine. But #Thursday and #FiveThings are just needless jumble. They’re bad writing. And you see it everywhere. And it deserves to be mocked.
Thus, #hashtagrage. When people (companies especially) use social media obnoxiously, I think they should be insulted for it.