The Art of the Hashtag
The hashtag. The pound sign. The thing-that-everybody-knows-but-can't-agree-on-what-to-call-it.
For people of a certain age—namely, anyone old enough to remember life before Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or social media in general (which includes me, considering I also grew up before even the iPhone was a thing)—that little square-like symbol on your phone's keypad means something; for the rest of you (namely, everyone born before 1990), you can thank Twitter for calling it something completely different (and also for giving us "old folks" headaches and constant grief whenever we hear it spoken aloud by people young enough to be our kids...which many of you are, anyway). But I digress.
Contrary to what the court of public opinion might think, the thing-that-everybody-knows-but-can't-agree-on-what-to-call-it isn't a new invention—in fact, it's actually really, really old. On top of that, it also gave those of us in the English-speaking world an abbreviation that we use literally every day yet never really knew how we ended up with it.
And once again, you can thank the Romans.
The libra pondo as it would have looked written in Sir Isaac Newton's journal.
See, in addition to giving us in the West basically everything—law, an efficient means of water distribution to different places, how to properly go to the bathroom, using graffiti to make fun of someone—the Romans were also very astute in their measurements. For measuring weight, they used the libra pondo (literally "pound weight"); over time, this was abbreviated to lb. and shortened to what we colloquially today refer to as the pound (in the United States, anyway; the pound means something completely different in Britain).
Fast-forward a couple thousand years and people were still taking notes on measurements (and still using the pound), only this time the actual stylization of the libra pondo itself had been altered. Instead of looking like it did in Newton's time, bookkeepers in the 1850s decided to shave a few extra seconds off of their note-taking—and save their fingers—by using # instead. They also wanted to make reading their notes less confusing, so they devised a unique system that's still in use today: a 1917 manual of a Blickensederfer model 5 typewriter noted that placing the # before a figure (ex. a #2 pencil) would denote the number of a specific thing, while moving it after the figure (ex. a 10# bag of rice) signified the weight of it.
A common joke that many people like to make about smart phones is that we use them for everything but their intended purpose anymore, but even in the digital age, the pound sign is still a tiny technology staple. While rotary phones were a giant leap forward from the classic wind-up seen in many black-and-white movies, many of them only featured the numbers zero through nine ("newer" rotary phones can be found on the internet for relatively cheap, and while they do feature the pound sign and asterisk—and thus can be used as normal phones—they're still more of a novelty item due to the fact that nobody uses them anymore); it wasn't until the early 1950s when engineers at Bell Laboratories developed dual-tone multi-frequency signaling (DTMF) that the pound and asterisk would be commonplace on a telephone's touchpad.
Even though the symbols were added to keypads in 1968, it wasn't until the era of voicemails and fax machines in the early 1980s that they saw widespread use as applications for customer-controlled calling (you can thank Bell Laboratories for allowing you to check your cell phone bill by using *611, by the way). In fact, the Touch-Tone system that dual-tone multi-frequency signaling was marketed as became so widespread that the phrase Touch-Tone itself became ubiquitous and is still used today to describe any phone using DTMF technology. The reasoning for adding the pound sign and asterisk in the first place? Bell's engineers assumed—and rightly so—that one day a telephone would be used access a computer.
The pound sign was beginning to move out of the realm of pencil-and-paper and into the digital age. While it was being used in the information technology sphere since at least the 1970s to highlight specific pieces of text, it started gaining acceptance around 1988 among internet relay chat (IRC) networks as an efficient way to label groups and topics across the entire network (rather than a local server which used the ampersand instead).
It was almost a year after Twitter launched on July 15, 2006 when a blogger named Chris Messina posed an interesting question to the Twittersphere on August 23, 2007—what if they revived the pound sign and used it to make it easier for people to find whatever it was they were looking for? Also, what if they called it something else since "pound sign" felt a little too out-of-date?
The first-ever use of a hashtag on Twitter.
Ironically, Messina didn't call it a hashtag right out of the gate; that honor would go to Stowe Boyd when he wrote a tweet two days later, and then a blog post the day after that. The name soon gained traction when it was actively used in tweets associated with that year's San Diego forest fires. While Twitter users in the States were getting acquainted with the hashtag, it took another two years before it was widely accepted by the international community; the 2009-2010 election protests in Iran marked the first time that the use of a hashtag was seen in tweets in places other than the United States. Hashtags have become as useful and interchangeable as Swiss army knives, being used for
1. meta-commentary (#sunburned)
2. personal expression of feelings (#sarcasm)
3. company product/service/campaign promotion
4. non-commercial uses such as protests (#OccupyWallStreet) and official event
promotion (#Rio2016)
Interestingly, one place where hashtags operate differently are in languages without word dividers (ex. the spaces between words) like Chinese; because the language doesn't allow for spacing between characters, tweets written in Chinese often make use of double-hashtags (#name#).
Without a doubt, the hashtag has had an interestingly winding history; from its earliest use as a bookkeeping measurement to its modern reinterpretation as a way to let everyone else know how badly we want to take a nap after Thanksgiving dinner. And to think, it came from the same people who gave us decently-effective plumbing.
Thanks, Romans.
About the Author: Ronald Hamilton, Jr. is a graduate of Arizona State University's Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Mass Communication and Media Studies. When he's not writing for COM-GAP, Ronald is a volunteer with the nonprofit Live Forever Project.