#this post is for you: Hashtagging between audiences
Résumé
This paper considers the use of hashtags to navigate the multiplicity of publics that form the potential audience of a post on social networking sites (SNS).
Hashtags are linguistic sequences preceded by the symbol #, designed for metadata tagging, content aggregation and retrieval on SNS. While much of the research on hashtags addresses technical functions, propagation and visibility (e.g. Cunha et al. 2011), there is growing research on their communicative functions from pragmatic and sociolinguistic perspectives (notably, Scott 2015; Wikström 2014; Zappavigna 2015).
The SNS setting is open-ended on multiple levels (compared to direct speaker–addressee communication), thus more akin to publishing in many ways. Competent users simultaneously take advantage of the open-endedness and employ limiting strategies to facilitate the interpretation of messages.
Unlike the propagation perspective, I argue that thematically similar tags are not redundant or unsuccessful. Rather, in line with the concept of meaningful communicative competence (Hymes 74; Sanders 2015), more specialized, opaque, hashtags address relevant interest groups, highlighting more specific shared knowledge, but remain obscure to the wider audience (not unlike the use of specialized jargon/slang). Consequently, with multiple hashtags, posters can simultaneously address the same post to diverse layers of their public, conveying different messages. This function indicates that experienced SNS users are aware of the multiple communities within the potential audience and can competently navigate among them.