Understanding Hashtags: From my insufferable, 2011 Instagram Posts, to Legit Instructional Materials

I've never used hashtags to filter my virtual consent consumption until recently. My first attempts at tagging my Instagram posts... 15 years ago... were used to provide additional information about the post and, of course, for comedic effect. They were not used for the practical purpose of having my posts sorted by content. Tags' prevalence in the early 2010s seemed irrelevant to me, personally. At the time, since I had mostly used YouTube and Facebook, tags weren't available until Twitter came along. YouTube was easily categorized by content creators using keywords, and Facebook's search engine found keywords mentioned in posts. I never explicitly saw the #. Now, when X (FKA Twitter) came to my attention in the early-to-late 2010s, the 'tweets' stood out to me as a unique format: a short, concise update followed by a hashtag. On mobile, the hashtags were always linked and took the user to an organized subsection of popular/'hot' posts that contained that respective hashtag. For the first time, I began to see hashtags not as decorations, but as organizational tools. Clicking a hashtag transformed an individual post into part of a much larger conversation or even communicated a trending topic that could go viral. Think of how easy it was to see #icebucketchallenge and #cinnamonchallenge on Twitter back in the early 2010s. Still remained the problem of non-viral, non-concise topics that were either broad or, alternatively, especially niche: it gets messy.

For example, one person tags a post #education. Another uses #teaching. Someone else uses #edtech. A fourth person invents #teacherlife. Over time, the garden grows and becomes tangled. Someone looking for advice as a new teacher goes from #education to being expected to type #tipsandtricksforfirstyeareducators. Can we make social media sites comparable to, say, Pear Assessment's filtering system? I find it so easy to make tests for my students using this site. Ironically, one of the features I appreciate most is a characteristic I first ignored when hashtags first appeared: tagging.

When building assessments, I can quickly locate items aligned to specific standards, benchmarks, and skills through a carefully organized tagging system. Instead of scrolling endlessly through hundreds of questions, tags allow me to find the topic and filter content to find exactly what I need. 

The difference between my old Instagram hashtags and Pear Assessment's tagging system is intentionality. My hashtags were designed to show how funny I was and to add randomness to my posts. Pear's tags are designed to facilitate the retrieval and organization of test items for my math students. Yet both rely on the same underlying principle: attaching descriptive labels to information so it can be found later. The complexity lies in the fact that folksonomies aren't easy to compartmentalize because linguistics isn't as concrete as we'd like it to be for comprehension. There are elements of human nature that we desire to communicate through the internet: empathy and shared experiences, that can't necessarily be thrown onto a specific subreddit that communicates with ALL others that want/need to see the content. This is tough to navigate, given that the web is getting more congested with less human content. Will we have a hashtag or algorithm for navigating digital content that isn't AI soon? The hashtag started as a joke when I was younger, but now it's the best way we can organize through legitimate digital content. It's especially helpful for me as an educator on Teacher Pay Teachers/Edulastic.