#iam4H
This article was written for the Robesonian for their October 12, 2014 edition. So here is the question of the decade. When did the pound sign become known as a hashtag? Until recently, the pound sign’s major function in terms of technology was the button on your phone that you pressed to activate or deactivate call forwarding on your phone. That is before phones went everywhere with us, and now we no longer need call forwarding. As social media has taken off, so has the term hashtag (which is still called a pound sign unless it is used in front of a series of words to create a grouping). When Twitter launched on the world, users felt the need to find certain types of tweets easier, so the pound sign was used in front of the words as an organizational tool so searchers could group tweets of a specific topic together. Since “pound sign” did not sound technologically advanced, the symbol evolved to be known as the hashtag. Evolving is what w...