FUNCTIONAL POTENTIAL OF HASHTAGS

Abstract

The article explores functional potential of hashtags as technodiscoursive phenomena
which were introduced in social media network Twitter in order to organize its discourse and
to make it searchable, and whose capabilities influenced not only development of Internet discourse,
but also our perception of the world. The article focuses, in particular, on the evolution and
extension of hashtags’ functions and proposes functional classification of hashtags, detecting
the following functional roles and types of hashtags: topic markers of separate tweets / series
of tweets, organizers of narratives (of monological, dialogical or polylogical character) and specific
discussions, markers of rubrics (uniting tweets which have different topics, but accomplish the same
pragmatic purpose). Through these functions hashtags structure and organize Twitter-discourse,
accomplishing the function of folksonomy (social classification) tools and assuring “searchability”
of Twitter-discourse. The most popular hashtags enable users to observe the “history of society’s
worries and preoccupations” and the reaction of world community or citizens of certain country /
region to specific events / phenomena. Hashtags also assure quick diffusion of information at very
large scale (including information about violent events or other urgent matters); act as promotion
tools for brands and ideas, being at the same time instruments of market, competitors and clients’
preferences monitoring. One of the most important hashtags’ functions is a social one, given
the fact that hashtags conditioned the emergence and now assure functioning of socio-cultural
digital practices-rituals in Twitter. Another group is represented by hashtags that express
emotions / judgments / evaluation, exercising predicative & classificatory function; there are also hashtags-modalisators in Twitter which act, in fact, as explicit interpretative instructions
for the tweets they figure in. Hashtags-evaluative names form another group of hashtags which
are especially characteristic for political Twitter-discourse