Tagging Along
I’ll be honest: it took me a while to get the point of Twitter. I have been ‘tweeting’ just occasionally since 2007, but until this year I had never integrated the use of this service with my professional practice in any way. However, that has changed now, and I can pinpoint the time when it all started to make sense to me: it was the day when I started to make use of hashtags. This simple device has the power to convert apparently random observations from disparate individuals into thematic conversation. There is no technical magic involved with hashtags – it is simply a character which says ‘search me’. This convention enables lots of things to happen in terms of metadata and classification, and it works across all online technologies. But for the moment, I will focus on Twitter and the conversational power of the hashtag in that context.
Using a well-chosen hashtag in your tweets means that anyone can find your tweet on a given topic. Even better, it means that groups of users can sustain a conversation in a given ‘space’ once they have established a unique hashtag, and there have been lots of great examples of this. For example, there exists a weekly and global discussion about educational issues under the tag #edchat, which has proved a fertile ground for the exchange of ideas, as well as resources.(Incidentally, a good way of following discussions is to use a Twitter client such as Tweetdeck, which allows you to filter continuous search into a specified column on your screen.) Hashtags for conferences often work really well, because it is easy for a group of delegates to agree on a specific tag. Whether or not conference delegates and organisers find the use of Twitter a useful addition to the event, or an irritating distraction, is of course a matter of taste.
I have been looking at three hashtags in particular over the weekend, which collectively illustrate the power and also perhaps the limitations of this approach. These hashtags all relate to climate change, but in very different ways. #thewave acted as a focus for those attending the demonstration in London and elsewhere on Saturday, enabling people to report back, and for those not present to get a sense of what was going on. #cop15 is the informally agreed tag for those interested in proceedings in Copenhagen. Finally, I was also watching #climategate, relating to the email hacking incident at University of East Anglia. Interestingly, this has become space where climate change deniers have virtually ‘gathered’. I have sent tweets labelled with this tag, but these have failed to engage any of the participants. I wonder if this is because I don’t belong to their community? Even reading the tweets labelled with this tag gave me the uncomfortable feeling that I was somehow invading their space. This suggests that some of these hashtags have moved beyond simple topics of conversation, and are beginning to exhibit the characteristics of online communities.
If you are amongst the many who have only dabbled with Twitter, and perhaps remain unconvinced about its value, I recommend that you install a Twitter client and run a search on one of the above tags, or something that appeals to you. You may be surprised at what you find….
