Is The Hashtag Part Of A Swear Word?

You’ve settled in to watch Game of Thrones and there it is, looming on the bottom right of the screen:

#GameOfThrones

Why? What does it want from you? Can’t you just watch the boob tube in peace?

The hashtag, so named due to the # hash symbol, grew in popularity with the rise of Twitter, and is used as a means to pool topics together. It has since permeated other social media platforms, most notably Instagram, Tumblr, Google+ and Flickr.

How does it work in practice? Let’s examine our own tweet,

“MAJOR #celebrity sighting in a Tidal Wave t-shirt. #bestdayever pic.twitter.com/DDSG48h267”

The two hashtags #celebrity and #bestdayever lump our tweet with any other tweet using that tag. So not only does our statement show up on the @TidalWaveAgency feed, it also appears between tweets about Kim Kardashian in the #celebrity feed, and among people talking about winning the lottery in the #bestdayever feed.

No spaces, else the first word only becomes the tag, and case does not matter; #ilovepie, #ILovePie and #iLOVEpie are one and the same. (However not equivalent to #ILuvPie).

And you can invent whatever you want, really: #TidalWaveIsTheChuckNorrisOfAds, for example

The only enemy of the hashtag is not catching on, thus banishing it to the trash heap of internet uselessness. Which brings us full circle to why #GameOfThrones is on the screen in the first place. The fine folks at HBO want to educate that the official place to congregate your tweets (or photos or Google Pluses) is there. More hits, more tweets, more interest, mo’ money…marketing, baby.