Your Brain Already Hashtags

Mnemonics are just a way for you to remember things more easily. They’re little tricks, like “Every Good Boy Does Fine” helps you remember EGBDF, the notes on the lines of a treble clef. Mnemonics are powerful, because they can help you remember a music lesson from 2nd grade, even if you’ve never used music theory ever in your life.

But, not to put too fine a point on it, Mnemonics are actually helping you with retrieval. You learned the notes on the lines, and memorized them-- its getting access to those memories that sometimes requires tricks.

And when you think of the internet as a sort of melding of minds, what tricks can be used to retrieve those “memories?” Lately, the trick has been the “hashtag”

Hashtags were invented by Chris Messina in 2007, as way to manually index the content of blogs and social media. He came up with the idea of prefacing keywords with the # symbol, borrowing from the method programmers use to make comments in their code. The concept was eventually picked up by other users on Twitter, became ubiquitous by the time of the SXSW event. Since then, hashtags have allowed people to add their thoughts to the latest zeitgeist as it happens.

Of course, the latest zeitgeist is the #hashtag, a self-referential usage that is best explained in the Jimmy Fallon/Justin Timberlake sketch. As funny as it is, it nevertheless shows exactly the power of hashtags.

By using them, people on the internet are creating a internet-memory mnemonic to help retrieve just what they’re looking for. But is it making the internet “smarter?” That’s up to you to decide.