Author Description

"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."