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#nospaceforhashtagsinreallife

February 16, 2012
By Ryan Stern

#omgrememberthattimeinhighschool

#thatawkwardmomentwhenthatguydoesthatthing

What is wrong? Is your spacebar broken?

For average university students, social media plays a large role in our daily lives. However, if one is to use social media, they should use it properly.

For clarification, a hashtag is not a punch line. Just because you have a short, succinct thought about your friend’s recent Facebook status does not mean you can put a pound symbol in front of it and remove the spaces.

Don’t get me wrong, the hashtag does have a practical use—emphasis on the singular. Twitter, the centre of social media buzzwords, uses hashtags as hyperlinks to find trending topics. It’s a useful tool for finding out who is talking about a specific topic or what is trending on any given day. Call it a first world problem, but using hashtags out of this domain drives me crazy.

This tool does not encompass Facebook. This tool does not encompass YouTube. This tool is not a part of everyday conversation.

If you would like to tell someone about a problem that arises because you are a member of the upper-middle class, it does not make sense to preface this with “hashtag firstworldproblems”.

If your friend is making a funny face in their Facebook profile picture, is it #awkward or just plain awkward? Imagine your grandmother’s reaction if you said #loveyou at the bottom of a letter sent via snail mail.

Never mind the fact that saying a hashtag just doesn’t sound right—because it doesn’t—but have you ever tried to read someone hashtagging a complete phrase? When reading the English language, I was taught to end words by adding a space—but that protocol has obviously gone by the wayside when hashtagging.

I can’t tell you how many times I have tried to read a comment on Facebook such as “#thatsincredible” and wondered if the person was talking about a credible sin or exclaiming the incredulous nature of an event. Unless someone is willing to make a dictionary describing the different letter separations in hashtags, they shouldn’t expect people to have to decipher a simple English phrase just because they felt a pound sign was necessary.

Jack Layton—may he rest in peace— was able to use hashtags to his advantage, which is almost laughable. The fact that he was able to gain the approval of so many youth through the use of the phrase, “hashtag fail” in a debate is genius on his part, but what does it say about the people who appreciated that statement?

Much has been made of the deterioration of the English langage, but it is predicated on spacing between words. Would hashtagging even be considered English?

So next time you want to write “#loser” on your friend’s lame status update about a weekend of studying, consider dropping the pound symbol. As a quick, simple rule of thumb, if it isn’t on Twitter, drop the pound.

As for the #win and #fail at the bottom of this page, that is a little awkward—sans hashtag.

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