As millennials in 2017, the word “hashtag” has somehow stitched itself into the fabric of our conversations, embedded itself at the bottom of every advertisement on bus shelters, right next to a brand’s website, and it seems almost archaic to not stick a #foodcoma at the end of your food posts on Instagram. In spite of the hashtag takeover in the past decade, have you ever paused to wonder where, oh where, tagging came from?
In the mid-1960s, the inventors and innovators, Bell Laboratories, creators of the Touch Tone phone, sought out across America which symbols the population would prefer to utilise within the upcoming state-of-the-art technology. Their market research produced that the asterisk (*) and what we call the hashtag (#), which proved to be ideal for their audiences, and both symbols later appeared on the typewriter. Since, these symbols have emerged on fax machines, telephones, and most recently, on our touch screen mobiles.
Chris Messina, a social technology expert in 2007 had the bright idea that Twitter adopt the hashtag system in order to categorize and index certain discussions by the use of particular keywords anteceded by a #. In the decade since, hashtags have become a trend necessity for bloggers, advertisers and social media moguls. It is the fastest and simplest means by which relevant information, images, videos, opinions and articles can be located on connected platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, Pinterest, Youtube, Twitter and Google+.
Isn’t that #sTAGgering?
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