Week 2: Birthday's, Knights, and the Death of Hashtags

You know it's going to be a great semester when it starts off with your Birthday. They say as you get older, birthdays continue to become less and less important, but I say that's total baloney! So this year, for my 26th, I gathered my friends and family and traveled back in time to the era of knights and lords to have a Medieval Feast. In other words, I spent a whole lotta money and went to Medieval Times and had a wonderful time!

For those of you unfamiliar with this dinner show, guests are invited to dine as "lords and ladies" and are assigned knights who partake in jousting and tournament games while on horseback. This whole experience had me thinking about just how far we as a society have come in regards to networks and communication. As relayed over dinner, Lords recruited knights to serve and work with them, creating small networks that helped families and those with power survive. Kingdoms shared news and information on the local level, and passing travelers and merchants spread kingdom gossip as they traveled from town to town. They would even employ animals, like hawks and falcons, to carry written news across the lands, praying that they would make it safely and deliver the content. I got to meet one of these falcons at the show!

The average townsfolk was purely a consumer, and your level of engagement was based on your socioeconomic class. Those at the top were privy to the most important information. The educated could read and write and were able to be creators during this medieval age. Those not so fortunate could only learn what was directly passed along to them, and who knows how much fake news spread via word of mouth... aren't we so lucky to be living in completely different times! 🙄

Yet somehow, some things never really change.

Jumping forward centuries, we now share information completely differently but it still has some similar concepts: Kingdom gossip has turned into "trends" and the traveling merchant sharing their tales are now called "influencers" selling their own image as a product. However, the role the average person plays has completely been restructured. Through social media and other Web 2.0 tools, users can actively create, remix, share, and engage with content on a global scale. The modern user has effectively become a “produser,” simultaneously producing and consuming media within digital spaces. The best part is, there is no longer a socioeconomic divide, and everyone can access it equally!

Or can they? 

Today, social networking is less influenced by socioeconomic class and instead more focused on the gap between digital literacy skills. Those born as "digital natives" have quite the upper hand to previous generations, or "digital immigrants" when it comes to using social media and other web 2.0 tools. This weeks readings heavily focused on this gap, specifically focusing on digital language and "accents." Digital natives grew up surrounded by technology and are generally fluent in its usage. They were raised alongside the internet, social media, and had instant access to information. Digital immigrants, on the other hand, had to adapt to this technology later in life and often translate it into systems they are more familiar with. One example is the tendency to print out emails or physically edit digital documents. While neither group is inherently “better,” digital natives tend to thrive more naturally within digital environments because they understand the language and culture of online spaces. 

It is no longer Kings and Queens who control the social media landscape, but rather those who understand how to use and manipulate it. Even being born into a digital world is not enough anymore: Social media evolves at such a rapid pace that we the people must constantly adapt to new trends, features, algorithms, and forms of communication just to remain relevant. One year everyone is obsessing over things like hashtags, and the next year the algorithm barely even acknowledges they exist, which is something I am still mad about as I try to enter the content creator space!

Remember when hashtags were EVERYTHING? #ThrowbackThursday, #fyp, #YOLO...

Users practically spoke in pound signs to engage with their own networked community. Hashtags once functioned like digital banners in a medieval kingdom. They grouped communities together, organized discussions, and helped people discover content beyond their immediate circles. If you understood how hashtags worked, you could grow your content, find communities, and spread ideas much farther than before. Today, when I make a post or Instagram reel, the hashtags do NOTHING! It feels like I'm sacrificing my posts into a void and praying the algorithmic gods smile upon me. We have come full circle. Instead of praying to the skies for our messenger falcon to make it to the neighboring kingdom safely, we instead pray to the algorithm bots to push our content to the masses.

Instead of people actively searching for information, platforms now push content directly toward us through personalized recommendation systems. The “town square” of social media has slowly transformed into an invisible system where algorithms determine what deserves attention and what disappears into the void. 

In a weird way, the hashtag did not really die.

It was simply overthrown.

#thanksforstoppingby! #Ihopeyouenjoyedseeingtheconnectionbetweenmedievaltimesandmodernsocialmedia
#fyp