Hashtag (Object Lessons)

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Hashtags silence as well as shout. They originate in the quiet of the archive and the breathless suspense of the control room, as well as in the roar of rallies in the streets. The #hashtag is a composite creation, with two separate design histories: one involving the crosshatch symbol and one about the choice of letters after it. Celebration and criticism of hashtag activism rarely addresses the hashtag itself as an object or tries to locate its place in the history of writing for machines. Although hashtags tend to be associated with Silicon Valley invention myths or celebrity power users, the story of the hashtag is much more interesting and surprising, speaking to how we think about naming, identity, and ownership. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in __The Atlantic__. Best Books of 2019-Scholarly Kitchen Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Hashtags can silence as well as shout. They originate in the quiet of the archive and the breathless suspense of the control room, and find voice in the roar of rallies in the streets. The #hashtag is a composite creation, with two separate but related design histories: one involving the crosshatch symbol and one about the choice of letters after it. Celebration and criticism of hashtag activism rarely address the hashtag as an object or try to locate its place in the history of writing for machines. Although hashtags tend to be associated with Silicon Valley invention myths or celebrity power users, the story of the hashtag is much longer and more surprising, speaking to how we think about naming, identity, and being human in a non-human world. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic . Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Hashtags silence as well as shout. They originate in the quiet of the archive and the breathless suspense of the control room, as well as in the roar of rallies in the streets. The #hashtag is a composite creation, with two separate design histories: one involving the crosshatch symbol and one about the choice of letters after it. Celebration and criticism of hashtag activism rarely addresses the hashtag itself as an object or tries to locate its place in the history of writing for machines. Although hashtags tend to be associated with Silicon Valley invention myths or celebrity power users, the story of the hashtag is much more interesting and surprising, speaking to how we think about naming, identity, and ownership. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic . "Celebration and criticism of so-called "hashtag activism" rarely addresses the hashtag itself as an artifact or tries to locate its place in the history of reading and writing for machines. Although hashtags tend to be associated with Silicon Valley invention myths or power users like celebrities, the hashtag is actually the result of accreted sets of practices and invisible labor involving negotiating competing claims about identity, ownership, and naming conventions. Thus the hashtag is part of the longer history of metadata that has involved cataloging and classifying objects throughout human history. However, high-tech machine learning algorithms are changing this traditional process of collective meaning making in which content is sorted into groups to be more easily findable, and perhaps computational agents will one day apply metadata to data in ways that exclude human decision-making entirely." "Hashtags can silence as well as shout. They originate in the quiet of the archive and the breathless suspense of the control room, and find voice in the roar of rallies in the streets. The #hashtag is a composite creation, with two separate but related design histories: one involving the crosshatch symbol and one about the choice of letters after it.Celebration and criticism of hashtag activism rarely address the hashtag as an object or try to locate its place in the history of writing for machines. Although hashtags tend to be associated with Silicon Valley invention myths or celebrity power users, the story of the hashtag is much longer and more surprising, speaking to how we think about naming, identity, and being human in a non-human world."--Rabat Elizabeth Losh. Includes Bibliographical References And Index.