THE RISE OF THE HASHTAGGERS. And why I hate them.

I completely understand how long hours spent playing in any form of social media can affect one’s psyche.  A community is developed, bonds are created, emotional energy in invested.The attachment is palpable. The functions and limitations of the preferred media become second nature, the keyboard quickly becomes our voice. An extension of our body that, although utterly false, seems totally logical. Having written and read an endless stream of post we begin to think ‘in format’. Cyber-speak is our second tongue. Emoticons are our online gesticulations replacing the body language we would otherwise require as functioning human beings to interpret the subliminal messages in a face to face meeting. I get it, I am it. I am part of the world wide web of social interaction.

However, I do live in a specific corner of the cyber universe and I have noticed of late a certain cross pollination of media  forms that I find highly irritating. There is a blight on my Facebook landscape. A cross hatching plague spreading through my world and afflicting those I thought were above such attention seeking. I refer, of course, to the insidious hashtag.

The tweeting populace of the planet is legion and growing daily. I am happy for them, they have found like minded people and are forging relationships that they would not otherwise have had the opportunity to initiate. But why can’t they keep their own dialect of cyber speak to themselves? It really doesn’t translate successfully into other media, and likewise the language of other media does not easily transverse the social spectrum.

For instance, emoticons do not work on blogs. I found this out on my debut post when I added a smiley face.It was the creepiest smiley face I have ever seen. It was the evil clown of smiley faces. I realised then that emoticons belong on Facebook and virtually nowhere else. They are part and parcel to the Facebook vocabulary, a valuable visual extension of the written exchange. Only on emails to one’s closest friends can emoticons be added  (which is kind of a shame given the excellent range of possibilities offered by my server).

Hashtags are not applicable outside of the twitterverse. There they serve a function – to catergorise metadata. No such function is served elsewhere. They are either typed out of habit, or as a desperate need for the writer to attract attention to some point they are making. It is a shorthand subtitle that fails miserably. So, my chronic hashtagging friends, I would dearly love for you to exercise some restraint when posting in my beloved Facebook. Henceforth, please stick to the time honoured range of silly emoticons like everyone else!