How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Hashtag

Indulging in a recent retrospective of my Twitter timeline—the 2012 equivalent of flipping through your baby photos—I came across this heartrending cri de coeur from my previous self: "Maybe life *would* be better if I just relaxed and learned to love wry hashtags." 

By happy coincidence, this was on the same day I read this beautifully serious-minded examination of the hashtag from the New York Times, which charts its evolution from simple topic aggregator to a bona fide 'literary device'. I'm pleased to say that after a conscientious program of self-reeducation, I myself did indeed learn to stop worrying and love the hashtag, but I'd still argue that my early objections to the medium hold some valid truth-nuggets for individuals, brands and organizations committing crimes against Twitter with a blunt tag:

Crime #1: Unnecessary. When I first started using Twitter, my key problem with hashtag use was that everyone was doing it (with trending hashtags as the proof.) I've since gladly accepted that hashtagging is actually a central part of the Twitter vernacular, a mode of expression that's evolved out of the necessary brevity of the platform and come into its own. But the worst-judged brand/organizational hashtags I see out there seem to be employing them just for the sake of doing so, because everyone else is—and wind up appearing misplaced, inappropriate or just plain embarrassing  My favorite example of how comical an incongruous hashtag can be comes in the shape of an endearingly befuddled Liam Neeson instructing fans via this promotional video to “tweet hashtag #Taken2Scene” with the air of a man who's just learned these words phonetically five minutes beforehand. This video is the reason I have my 'Not everything needs a hashtag' tattoo. (Just kidding! I got that done way before.)

Sometimes going through a YouTube video
frame-by-frame can really pay off

Crime #2: Too clever by half. On my first Twitter voyages I was baffled by the strange affliction my friends seemed to have fallen prey to—the inability to express themselves in 140 characters without giving over the last 40 to what the Times article dubs "a pithy phrase, preceded by that hungry octothorpe [#], used to either label or comment on the preceding tweet". Yet what baffled (and irritated) me most was the studied nonchalance, the straining for wryness, the faux-artless artfulness of it all. In essence: hashtags just seemed so try-hard. I'll now happily concede that much of my initial ire was based in my lack of understanding of the tag's place in Twitter speak, but would still maintain that this little symbol can often lay bare any inconsistencies in persona and tone by somehow placing the impetus on the tweeter to be oh-so-droll, all the time. Resist the pressure, social mediators: authenticity always wins! Which leads me to my final point:

Crime #3: The snark. So many applications of the humble hashtag out there sound chillingly close to the self-regard and bargain-bucket 'irony' of your more annoying type of teenaged girl. (That was me, by the way; I'm talking about myself.) Hashtags like #whatever, #yeahright, #awkward or (ye gods) #justsayin are turning us all into the dreaded Snarkasaurus Rex, as if enthusiasm and sincerity were Twitter Kyrptonite. This is pernicious enough when it infects individuals' tweets, but when brands try and play that game in an attempt to further humanize their institutional voice, everybody loses and nobody grows up. Hashtags should not be not safe-houses for sniping or needless negativity, people.

What do you think, hashtaggers?