How Hashtags have changed the way we communicate

By Rayan Tilmatine

BlueDevilHUB.com Staff–

The pound sign was not always known as a hashtag, nor used to communicate through social media.

Nowadays, it has become a way we communicate online as well as in the real world.

Though it seems that the hashtag is a relatively recent symbol, it was actually first used in 1988 by the Internet Relay Chat for the same purposes that we use them today: messaging, photos and such. It was not until 2007 when the term hashtag was first used by blogger Stowe Boyd.

Now, Twitter has implemented the hashtag into the system, hyperlinking anything with a hashtag in front of it and making it easier for people to navigate twitter by searching something starting with the hashtag symbol.

Not only Twitter, but Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr, Youtube and Google Plus have adopted hashtags for use.

You can now see hashtags being used with TV shows, celebrities, politics and breaking news. Every popular or new show on TV now has a hashtag that somehow relates to it. With that hashtag, Twitter will hyperlink that hashtag and allow fans to communicate.

Although hashtags have been used for useful and appropriate reasons, it has been seen as a way to provide commentary and invoke sarcasm on social media posts.

Hashtags started to be seen on other websites around the same time they began to evolve, quickly becoming a use in real conversations and having a huge affect on the way we communicate.

As the current generation expects instant access and typically have a shorter attention span, things like hashtags, acronyms and abbreviations have been very appealing to current teens.

As we see there is an extreme value in hashtags in our current society, as it influences all uses of communications online. With people slowly having shorter attention spans and the internet quickly making the world smaller with communication, hashtags seems to be here for the long run.