BY AYESHA BİLAL (PSYC/III)
ayesha@ug.bilkent.edu.tr
We see it everywhere, and most of the time its purpose is misconstrued, to say the least. I see it as a kind of epidemic taking over generation after generation, as most of its incredibly dedicated users seem to be morphing conventional language into something entirely and unnecessarily incomprehensible. Yes, I am talking about the hashtag symbol that accompanies every word and sometimes, just to add more confusion into the mix for kicks, a group of words together. Gone are the days of spacing out your words for easier human comprehension and, well, just for the sake of propriety really. Now I’m not accusing every social media user of this derailment from lingual normality, but I am seeing it a lot more as time goes on. It keeps getting worse, and my fears for the newer generation of social media users, regardless of their age, seem to be slowly coming true, as the digital language they have been most exposed to is one where hashtags are used as a means of highlighting the important words of one’s statement or as a way of summing up one’s declaration with a redundant, meaningless clause at the end.
Where did hashtags actually originate from? You may already be aware of the story behind the first use of the hashtag by Chris Messina on Twitter back in 2007. I don’t know about you, but for me it seems shocking that it has taken only since 2007, when the hashtag symbol was adopted as a means of forming Twitter groups, to get to the situation where we are now, when the hashtag is used in pretty much all contexts, having evolved into something much more than what it was created to be. But such is the nature of Internet trends; they grow and evolve until they become something completely different from what they started out as. However, in the case of the hashtag, I feel a personal annoyance at its misuse and overuse. The last straw was when I recently heard it being used in daily conversation. My irritation had no bounds, even if the people talking were unaware of it. I felt something break inside me as I tried harder and harder to figure out the need for this use—which need, I concluded, really didn’t exist.
So I thought I’d list some basic etiquette for hashtag usage, which I admit sounds like common knowledge, but which I find becoming increasingly ignored as the hashtag takes over language as a reference mark that is used with more enthusiasm than normal punctuation itself. Now, to be fair, it’s not a completely useless article of punctuation. Proper use of the hashtag has been revolutionary as a tool in gathering groups for important purposes, and has taken a role in many significant and radical movements in the past few years. Most famously, #BlackLivesMatter, #Bring BackOurGirls, and #GazaUnder Attack or #IsraelUnderFire, to name a few, have been especially significant in riling up the public to engage in radical movements aimed at changing the way society works and raising awareness of serious issues from the people’s point of view. Even lesser-known hashtags for smaller movements have been important in raising awareness and getting people to progress collectively. Women’s rights, racial issues and political issues that tend to be suppressed in regular newscasting are highlighted, as are many health issues, diseases and disorders that need to receive more attention: for instance, a lot of money has been collected for ALS research and more awareness of the condition itself brought about through the viral spread of the hashtag created for it.
That being said, the importance that the hashtag can have should not be an excuse for its misuse, which is an entirely different matter. It reflects upon, in my opinion, the level of intellectual and cultural sophistication we have reached as humankind—which is today being challenged by something as meager as a typographical symbol. Aware as I am of its insignificance in the daily course of life, it still stands out to me as something I feel an aversion toward in terms of the manner of its usage. A perfectly normal and literate sentence can be changed into incomprehensible gibberish when the unnecessary placement of a hashtag for the purpose of following a linguistic trend takes away all of mankind’s years of lingual advancement. Okay, maybe I am exaggerating a bit, but I really do feel that if awareness needs to be brought by means of the hashtag to another topic, it might as well be the butchering of written language because of its misuse.
#Havingagreatvacation can just as easily, and more comprehensibly, be written with spaces between individual words and without the purposeless addition of a symbol completely removed from its perfectly reasonable function in cyberspace. And to my exasperation, I see its use as a trendy method of word conjunction spreading, quite apart from its proper use as a means of bringing together a group.
I don’t see a resolution for this; trends have a life of their own. But they also die in their turn as new ones replace them. And although this one seems pretty elongated, I’m sure the hashtag will someday be replaced by another short-lived means of cybercommunication, which will, like the hashtag, reflect on the evolution of society in both positive and unfortunate ways. The only request I make while the hashtag pandemic continues is: let’s try to speak with adequate human language proficiency in our daily lives and confine the cybertalk to social media.