FUNCTIONAL POTENTIAL OF HASHTAGS

Abstract

The article explores functional potential of hashtags as technodiscoursive phenomenawhich were introduced in social media network Twitter in order to organize its discourse andto 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 andextension of hashtags’ functions and proposes functional classification of hashtags, detectingthe following functional roles and types of hashtags: topic markers of separate tweets / seriesof tweets, organizers of narratives (of monological, dialogical or polylogical character) and specificdiscussions, markers of rubrics (uniting tweets which have different topics, but accomplish the samepragmatic 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’sworries 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 verylarge scale (including information about violent events or other urgent matters); act as promotiontools 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, giventhe fact that hashtags conditioned the emergence and now assure functioning of socio-culturaldigital practices-rituals in Twitter. Another group is represented by hashtags that expressemotions / judgments / evaluation, exercising predicative & classificatory function; there are also hashtags-modalisators in Twitter which act, in fact, as explicit interpretative instructionsfor the tweets they figure in. Hashtags-evaluative names form another group of hashtags whichare especially characteristic for political Twitter-discourse