Ever since my good friend Zeynep Tufekci brought me a revolutionary t-shirt from Egypt, I’ve been fascinated by the popularization of hashtags outside of Twitter. And by outside, I don’t mean on blogs, Facebook, and Flickr, where they’re increasingly appearing, but offline. T-shirts, posters, graffiti, and protest signs all make use of hashtag symbolism; rather than long slogans (or in most cases, in addition to), we’ve cut down our symbols into bite-sized pieces, for better or worse. Even the Obama campaign has a hashtag-themed fundraising t-shirt. Here are just a few samplings (photos are from around the blogosphere):
If you have any other excellent examples (particularly from Syria), do send them my way.
One reply on “#Hashtagging Real Life”
[…] 34 I have personally compiled photographs of offline hashtag appearances here: https://jilliancyork.com/2011/10/16/hashtagging-real-life/. 35 The framework presented within the paper “Blogs and Bullets: New Media in Contentious […]