And so we move from selfies—an accidental new form of photography—to a typographical innovation dangling at the end of an equally unpredictable chain of events: the hashtag.
So far as social media is concerned, hashtags began on August 23, 2007, when tech innovator Chris Messina posted this suggestion on Twitter: “how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?” Messina was suggesting a way of identifying and making it easy to find Tweets related to the same topic or event. By combining the little-used # symbol with a word or phrase—when #TypedWithoutSpacesLikeThis—a single unique search term was created.
What to call this? For decades in America, # had been known as the “pound sign”: a shorthand for pounds in weight, thanks to a scribal corruption of the abbreviation for the Roman libra pondo—“lb”—dating all the way back to the fourteenth century. Its migration to standard keyboard symbol came courtesy of Bell telephone engineers in the 1960s, who chose # as the function key for their new touch-tone telephones, complete with a tongue-in-cheek coinage of their own: the “octothorpe.” Early computer programmers, however, knew # as the “hash” symbol, thanks to its use in mathematical hash functions (used for rapidly locating database entries: a long term is replaced by a shorter “hash value,” speeding up searches). Meanwhile, “tag” was a common term for taxonomical topic identifiers. Hence hashtag, a word coined in a blog post of August 26, 2007, by “web anthropologist” Stowe Boyd under the title “Hash Tags = Twitter Groupings,” written in specific response to Messina’s suggestion.2
It took the Twitter corporation some time to acknowledge the usefulness of this latest innovation—as it did with “retweets” and the use of @ to send messages, both of which were also user creations. As it turned out, however, hashtags added far more than mere searchability. Over time, they became an opportunity for pleasingly compressed commentary and self-dramatization (#SayItFast: you only get 140 characters per message on Twitter). Like other innovations we’ll encounter, hashtags spoke to a desire to make online language as messily, emotively human as possible; layering performance and in-jokes in an effort to capture the expressiveness of face-to-face conversation #ABitLikeThis #SincereFrown. Not for nothing did the UK’s high court label Twitter a “conversation without speech” in a 2012 judgment.3
The power of hashtags was soon being felt across other social networks—even when character limits didn’t apply—and, eventually, everyday speech. To hear someone end a spoken sentence with the words “hashtag first world problems” is truly to be living in the digital age. (Rough translation: “I want you to know that I know that this thing could only be perceived as a problem by someone privileged; nevertheless, insulated by self-awareness, I am moaning about it.”)
Hashtags like #FirstWorldProblems (caps optional) also point toward the format’s prominent second life as a campaigning political tool. Across America and then the world, the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter trended in 2013 and 2014 in response to police brutality toward African Americans; the hashtag #EverydaySexism, begun as a website in April 2012 by British writer Laura Bates, has become a rallying tool for calling out casual sexism across everyday life.
My favorite misreading of modern trends, though, comes from orthopedic surgery, where # has long been a symbol for bone fractures. In a surgeon’s notes, writing “#NOF” means “fractured neck of femur”—a broken hip. On one recent occasion, a medical friend told me a junior surgeon asked his boss in confusion why someone had written “hashtag N-O-F” on their patient’s notes and whether this was a trending topic. Digitally native, he couldn’t see the symbol any other way.