The #tag (Hashtag)

Before most of us got a glimpse of coding languages (#include<iostream.h>), the symbol "#" was only to be a sight on phones, cell phones, and also the keyboard. 

Here's the deal. Today morning, I saw on my newsfeed that one of my friends had liked someone's photo. I hovered my mouse over the link, The liked photo had a hash tag. I was curiously stupid enough to click the hash tag. That took me to another page, which was nowhere related to the first picture that my friend had liked. As in most cases, the photo that my friend had liked, was that of a girl. And again,  as in the case of most people who use hash tags on their photos, this lady had not a clue of why and how hash tags are used. Now that might sound rude, but that, in fact is the truth. Most of us have no clue why we use hash tags. More often than not, we use it thinking that it will up the "Cool" factor of whatever we post. Ever seen the photos of dishes people order in a restaurant? The photos have more hash tags than the number of people who have eaten the dish inside that photo in the past year. #nomnom, #yumm, #eatingoutside, #noteaten44days, #hungry are just a few of the common "foodie" hash tags. And then we have SELFIE photos hash tagged as #Selfie. Real smarts!

By the way, I'm sure that we know what the #tag is used for. Okay, I'm nowhere close to "sure" on that one. But simply put, they just cluster all related posts with the same hash tag together. So when you click on a hash tag, you have information related with the initial post where you saw the hash tag. To be honest, the hash tag that I had clicked on, was on a photo of an early Christmas party that was happening in the ladies hostel of my college. Nice! I, like most creatures with stuff hanging between our legs, thought

"The hash tag must be a common thing on many, if not all photos of the party."

Whoops. Apart from completely not seeing a single other photo of the Christmas party, I was directed  to some family function of a bunch of people from Singapore. I almost cried. The worst part was that every member of the Singaporean family was kind of old. And all the ladies looked in their middle age, the age when the middle of your body is all that exists. Brilliant!

To the ladies... Next time, when you do put a hash tag on photos, make it a coordinated effort with your gang. Don't simply go Lone Wolf. You end up directing excessively curious people to inappropriate pages. 

After this so-called morning debacle, my curiosity about the # symbol went straight through the roof. I knew about how the Hash tag became a "Twitter phenomenon" during Obama's 2008 election campaign, and how, thereon, it spread to other social networking sites like wild fire. Check this statistic of the use of the word "Hash" over time...

My screen was overflowing with all the tabs on the Hash tag. And all of a sudden, I began to wonder why the hell we had the * and # symbols on the Touch-Tone phones. The two buttons were never used unless you wanted to piss off the other person on the phone. But you could use any button on the phone on the phone to piss him/her, while you two were talking. So unless one were a baby, i.e. when one's hands could only reach the bottom rows of the telephone kept on the table, the "#" and "*" buttons were of no use. 

But go to a Computer nerd and mention the word "Hash". You'll be deluded with the entire history of the poor symbol, starting from its origin, to it's use in connecting telephone networks with computers, the whats, the nots and the what nots. 

I read a line in Wikipedia that stunned me a bit. It goes like this....

"The "*" is called the "star key" or "asterisk key". "#" is called the "number sign", "pound key", "hash key", hex key, "octothorpe", "gate" or "square". These can be used for special functions. For example, in the UK, users can order a 7.30am alarm call from a British Telecom telephone exchange by dialling: *55*0730#."

Nifty! Wow! All of this, just because my news feed showed me a friend of mine, who liked a girl's photo, who had mindlessly added a hash tag on her photo, that directed me to a Singaporean family's photo session! I never realized the power of frustration to get us curious. At  least, I can finally quote Einstein's famous line as my own!

"I have no special talents. I am just PASSIONATELY CURIOUS!"