#anoriginstory
So I was going to
post about the origins of the term “hashtag activism” but it seems pretty
universally accepted that it began being used to describe the #occupywallstreet
movement and that the original use of the term in news article from the Guardian on Sept.
29, 2011. This is an excerpt from that article.
"The advent of "hashtag activism" has been greeted with breathless claims about the birth of a new form of technology-based social movement. While such technologies can be extremely useful tools, they do not represent alternatives to the exhausting, age-old work of meeting people where they are, hearing their concerns, reaching common ground, building trust and convincing them that it is in their interests to act politically to change their circumstances. There are no shortcuts here; or to put it another way, it's not the protests that matter, but what happens in the time in between."
I think this entire blog may become an
exercise in dissecting the truth of this statement, and I may even dedicate an
entire post to this paragraph, but this is an origin story, and so I decided to
have a bit of fun an focus on something a bit more interesting the hashtag
itself. Why do we use this # symbol at all, why was it called a pound sign, and
how did it becoming the grouping symbol known as the hashtag today?
The term hashtag was only added to the
Oxford English Dictionary in 2014.[1]
But we all know the symbol is much older than that. This symbol it a bit of a
tricky thing because it is a symbol much like ampersand (&) that conveys a
meaning all on its own, without context, and is occasionally used in that way,
think “Press # to continue.” However, unlike the ampersand its meaning changes based on how it
is used and the name that people call it, at lease before the term hashtag,
depends on where you live (or at least where you learned to speak English).
So we're back to why? Why is this
symbol used so many different ways? Why does it have so many names? WHY IS IT
SO COMPLICATED? As with many things in the evolution of language the answer is
not entirely clear. But here’s what we do know, in America # is often referred
to as the pound sign. That may be because the first uses of a similar handwritten
symbol were to indicate pound weight or libre pondo (lb). The lines through the
lb are used to distinguish it from 1b.
This handwritten symbol could be
further simplified as #.
It also might make since to an
American that the same symbol would be adopted for bookkeeping shorthand as
well, after all the British currency is the Pound Sterling, and thus used as
number sign as well, as in #15. However, the British do not and never have used
the # to represent pounds they use the £ symbol, so its origin as the “number
sign” is a bit of mystery. Further, British printers were not known to use the
# symbol for pound weight either, so it was basically just handwritten
shorthand.
What this handwritten symbol needed
was some technology to spread it to the masses, and that technology arrived in
the form of the typewriter. The # symbol appeared on the keyboard of the Remington Standard typewriter created in 1886 and whether people
referred to it as the pound sign or the number sign, it became a part of a
typists arsenal and therefore familiar. In Britan it was referred to as a
“hash” likely due to the “hatched” lines, but regardless it was basically still
a shorthand symbol just in typed form.
The # symbol gets a bit of a rebirth with
the advent of the push button telephone where its inclusion is largely attributed
to the Bell Telephone Laboratory’s phone design surveys in the 1960s. For
whatever reason people though * and # where the best symbols to include on the
telephone, but what was that symbol called? The people at Bell Labs, the is
mostly attributed to a man named Don MacPherson, gave it a new name
“Octothorpe.” But that name didn’t really stick, it seems enough Americans
already knew it as the pound sign, or may its just hard to say!
But when Twitter was in its infancy it
was really hard to search, particularly when words were separate by spaces.
Topics weren’t grouped in an discernable manner and skimming a universe of
tweets even in the early 2000s wasn’t possible. So a former Google developer, Chris Messina proposed the solution on Twitter:
“how do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?”
And…people thought it was stupid. Perhaps it was, it does look kind of silly, but it was a simple solution to a complicated problem. Further it was used as a grouping tool for discussion forums in the 80’s and 90’s on a platform called Internet Relay Chat or IRC. It was one grouping character and every phone and computer had one. When the San Diego fires occurred later in 2007 it was really hard to search for relevant tweets due to the space in San Diego, so people started using #sandiegofire and it worked! Form there it was only a matter of time… and now your kids will say what the heck is “pound sign” that’s a hashtag!
[1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/06/13/hashtag_added_to_the_oed/
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