A linguistic change is happening in the English language. We're adding a new class of word, the "referent case", which is signified by a # before the word. The referent case shows the topic of a sentence, just like how the nominative case shows the actor of a verb, etc. We've already added the vocative case to English with the @ grammatical marking.
That's pretty interesting. I wonder how smileys fit into our grammar.
I often wonder what our typical grammar will look like in 50-100 years or more. I'm sure something will survive.
it's not English language that's changing, it's human language. Hashtags represent the implicit knowledge within human communication that there is a machine observer present. Hashtags are how humans help to guide machines to behave in the way that they expect.
"Know for a fact that there's no machine observer"
Using a hashtag, for a lot of people, isn't a deliberate indicator to effect a specific machine state at present time; it's an indicator that machine action may take place, not that it necessarily will. So, for example, people have been using non-functional hashtags on Facebook for a long time. Why would they do such a thing? They do so because the utility of the hashtag is dependent on the hashtag already being in widespread use. If you use it now, it may become useful later.
So it's not about saying "this text is definitely observed" or "this text is definitely not observed", it's about enabling the possibility under observation, either present observation or future observation.
Anyway, I think one of the articles linked to in your article (thanks for the link, btw), kinda misses the point:
“Sarah Palin for President??!? #Iwouldratherhaveamoose”
This usage totally subverts the original purpose of the hashtag, since the likelihood of anyone searching the term “Iwouldratherhaveamoose” is next to zero.
I would say the likelihood of anyone searching the term #Iwouldratherhaveamoose is not next to zero; it's probably closer to one. Firstly, the speaker. The speaker may have no prior knowledge of the hashtag, but having thought of it, knows that someone else had thought of it. After sending that tweet, what are the odds that the speaker's very next action will be to search #Iwouldratherhaveamoose, to see who else had thought of that tag and what they were doing. Secondly, the (human) audience. Part of this is to encourage someone else to make a new statement ending in #Iwouldratherhaveamoose; so the original speaker is incentivized to search this term sometime again in the future to see if their action has spawned a reaction.
I wonder: The "#Iwouldratherhaveamoose" example shows hashtags being used not to indicate a topic, but as a more advanced form of emoticons, i.e. to indicate the tone of the 'speaker'. "☹" or ":(" gives the general tone, but it's not precise enough.
That's a bit dystopic, implying for the first time that humans are aware of their new machine masters. But all languages, incl. English, has changed. English no longer has nominative/dative grammatical case markers (instead relying on word position), this can make spell checkers easier (since there are less permutations of words), does that mean humans did it for our machine masters? No because it happened hundreds of years ago.
"Machine masters" is a bit strong, IMHO. Hashtag use is strictly opt-in. Using a hashtag isn't about machines having power over humans, or humans having power over machines; it is about the harmony of human and machine language. It's a structure that bridges the divide, opening up the possibility of more fruitful communication between man and machine. I wouldn't say it's dystopic much in the same reason that I wouldn't say it's utopic; the existence of such structures is without virtue, because virtue is a byproduct of intent, and only the speaker can decide the intent of a hashtag (or the observer and the intent of the observation), not the hashtag itself. One could use hashtags for good or for evil, but it is not the hashtag itself that decides which is which.
As to the classification of the referent case, I don't have quite enough linguistic knowledge to engage that argument properly, but that's the first time I've heard it put that way.
Or it's a way for humans to communicate better with other humans. For example hashtags are often used in another way, like more verbose emoticons. Someone saying "Canteen out of coffee ☹" is telling you about their canteen and also how they feel about it. In "Canteen out of coffee #fail", the "#fail" hashtag is used like an emoticon here, but you have access to more "emoticon-hashtags" than before.
Hashtags in the original sense allowed people on twitter to communicate with strangers about a topic. This is humans talking to humans, not humans talking to machines.
Latin had a vocative case which was formed by changing the ending. "Et tu, Brute?" could be translated into "And you, @Brutus?", not the usage of "?", "," and "@" as grammatical markers.
After thinking about it: For languages with no spaces or other word separators hashtags probably don't work that well.
They might work for human readers but I think they are mostly useful because they can be automatically extracted or converted to links. I wonder if hashtags are used in Chinese or Japanese?
The fascinating thing about languages is that there is no rule without exception. When it comes to ! and ? even a familiar language like Spanish is suddenly strange.
I don't think you would choose to use this particular sentence in a serious communication with anyone. The letter case would just not be enough of a distinguishing factor for you to risk the wrong meaning being conveyed. The letter case only has a very small meaning once you get used to using small caps.
All languages change and have ambiguities. Modern English (with Capital Letters) has lots of ambiguities that cannot be disambiguated with capitals (e.g. "a small girls school")
Conversely, on its own, the fact that they remove some ambiguities is not a sufficient reason to use them.
Since the downvoters disagree, I'll provide a proof.
1. Suppose resolution of ambiguities is a sufficient reason for a separate case in written language.
2. Ambiguities exist that are not resolved.
3. New cases are not created to resolve these.
4. By contradiction, 1 is false.
QED
There may be other reasons which in addition to the resolution of ambiguity are sufficient to justify case, but you can't simply cite the resolution of ambiguity and say conclude that case is justified.
to add - the main meaning of upper case is to help separate sentences, because the dot alone is not enough, unless the reader is specifically used for the dot to be the only separator. this is an example.
As someone who created a startup around a hashtags search engine (1), I'm very glad of this development from a business point of view - the more hashtags are used, the better.
As I already wrote (2), though, I'm not sure if this is a great move for Facebook in the long run. Facebook owns the incredibly compelling core expectation of "easily sharing with friends and family through the Internet". But, for obvious reasons, public posts and comments are preferable for advertising purposes, so Facebook is also trying to eat Twitter's pie.
Problem is, can you be both the place where people connect with their closest connections, and where public discourse goes on? My guess is that you can't, and if this move really succeeds - which is entirely possible - this could be the start of the end of FB's domination of the "privately sharing" space - which is less easily monetized, but much more compelling than the "publicly sharing" one.
> can you be both the place where people connect with their closest connections, and where public discourse goes on?
This remains to be seen. They have been working on it just in a really crash, burn and restart process way. Mark Zuckerberg once went through two options for public discourse
* create a Facebook fan page
* open his personal profile to public
The first attempt was silently killed (from what I can see, this is my assumption) and now redirects to his personal page (www.facebook.com/markzuckerberg -> www.facebook.com/zuck). The second attempt, well, as you can see from his profile, it is pretty much closed up now.
Private sharing, as least from the friends I have, has been going on pretty frequently, just not on the timeline
* private groups
* group messages
With messages, it seems Facebook is testing inline message (1) along the status composer (on the homepage) which aligns with the thinking that they are making private sharing less restrictive to action on while maintaining "privacy" (in quotes, as some may not agree to the level of privacy offered)
I have no data to back up how effective private sharing is though.
Good points, but how many people really use private groups? Aren't your friends more technically able than most people?
Personally, I connected to a lot of people of facebook for political discussions, and in the end that detracted a lot from the effectiveness of FB as a mean to stay connected with my family and closer friends...
Why would you guess that you can't be that place? Personally, it would make much more sense to have a place where I share all my stories and then choose whether it should be for the public or just personal (like how it's currently done with Facebook). That makes more sense to me than having two separate sites to share public vs personal, as long as there is still the aspect that personal DOES, indeed, stay personal.
There are two problems. The first, most obvious one is that of clutter (not to say spam). The more public updates are in your feed, the less space there is for your personal - and more important - ones. Granted, there are solutions to this problem (groups), but how many people are even able to use them?
The second, more subtle - but more fundamental IMHO - one is that of Facebook's brand. If this succeeds, it will inevitably be diluted. In the long run, this could open the space to some competitor who focuses completely on the private space. This is difficult due to network effects, but not at all impossible.
hashtags allow the user to describe to the machine how to categorize a piece of text. So, for example, "I just stepped in shit. #winning" is a way for a user to have the sentence "I just stepped in shit" categorized in a specific way; not necessarily the way the machine would have chosen to categorize it. You're not supposed to just hashtag every word. Optimally, if another human clicks on one of your hashtags, they get to see some thematically related content. On some networks, though (Instagram in particular), hashtags are used to game the system; since there are discovery featured built around hashtags, merely including a popular hashtag can improve your visibility. So self-indulgent teens will hashtag their selfies with #food, because it's a primitive form of SEO gaming, and they wind up getting more likes. Or like with Go, people who code Go never actually call it "golang", but #golang is the canonical hashtag because it's more specific than #go, which is ... noise.
