The term “hashtag” was popularized by the rise of a social media site “Twitter”. Twitter was founded in 2006 and became popular in mid 2009. The "hashtag" term was first found in a newspaper article published on August 9, 2009. The article was titled: “Hashing Things Out” and it was featured in the New York Times Sunday edition. This article talked about how hastags have been constructed to be most condensed, most charged and least transparent as possible. The article gives this example: you might want to use the hashtag “#freeskip” instead of “#billgates” if you want to learn more about Bill Gate’s arrest. Using #billgates will show news about Bill Gates quitting Facebook and other things that may be irrelevant. A unique and specific hashtag is important so that the search results show what you were really looking for.
The first scholarly article I found containing “hashtag”
was titled: “You’ll Never Guess Who I Talked To: Tweeting at Conferences” by
Kristina M. DeVoe. This article talked about following up on a conference using
tools such as Twitter and commenting using hashtags. Nowadays, the meaning of
hashtags has not changed. It is still a pound key sign followed by a set of
words that link to a network of related posts. What has changed is the
application of hashtags. Hashtags have been adopted by social media sites other
than Twitter, such as Facebook, Instagram, Path and etc.
It is interesting to see that hashtags can go from fun and careless uses such as #yolo, to political issues or business conferences!
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