Hashtag activism
When I first started on Twitter some 35,000 tweets ago, I remember reading a starter’s guide to it. Under ‘hashtags’ it said that they were ‘unofficial’ and that they provided a ‘useful means of grouping tweets together for the purposes of searching’. I wonder what such a guide would say now? Whilst some people seem to have no understanding at all of them – such as the manufacturer of slap bands in Hong Kong who has printed ‘#hashtag’ as a logo, others are very savvy about their use. Politicians who have minions to run their social media presence for them use them extensively, and they can be used to cover up a multitude of inactivity whilst creating the illusion of engagement. The same could be said for celebrities. For some the recent #bringbackourgirls campaign has been a case in point.
Talking of points, I have just used well over 100 words to make mine. If a picture is indeed worth a thousand words, then Eric Allie’s brilliant cartoon below has 1014 of them. Watch and learn, communicators all! The economy and elegance of this cartoon would be hard to overstate:
See more of Eric’s work at furiousdiaper.com
