The use of # is fascinating me more and more as an indicator of rapidly spreading ideas on Twitter. The symbol # is variously known as the number sign, hash, and (in the US) the pound sign.

I first came across it in Cuba where addresses are commonly written ‘Apt 2 #345, Calle 21 entre l y M’. The # is used in place of ‘number’. It has been in use in the UK on touch-tone telephones since the 1980s; ‘press the hash key for more information.’ (See the  Language Log for an interesting summary of the origins of #.)

But back to Twitter. In order to group tweets together by topic or theme users preface their short messages with #. That preface becomes meta-data, information about the message which allows it to be tracked, aggregated, searched and collected together. So, as I am wondering about the verdict of the appeal that Amanda Knox has mounted in Italy against her conviction for the murder of Meredith Kercher, I search twitter with #Fox. Hundreds of short posts discuss her winning the appeal and imminent departure for the US. Because of the popularity of that hashtag in this particular moment (Monday evening) it has become a trending topic on Twitter in the UK. These trending topics are constantly in flux, mirroring the speed at which events, ideas, move in and out of the public’s gaze and interest. They provide, in a sense, a visualisation of the pulse emanating from the 65 million tweets which are posted each day. Another way of thinking about hashtags is to think of them as  niche radio stations for short posts of information and ideas. You can tune in or tune out. Contribute or not.

Like many recent media innovations there’s room to be creative. So alongside such rather predictable tags such as news items, places, and events, more and more people are gathering around hashtags such as the ones I’ve screen-grabbed above. #MeAndYouCan’tdate and #sorryimnotsorry are two hashtags that illustrate a couple of interesting cultural memes that are currently floating on the river of twitter.  What are they indicating? Meandyoucantdate is, well, frather final. It’s negative. Rather than advertising the qualities that attract, here are those that definitely repulse. Is it a reaction against dating sites … ‘I’m looking for … etc.’ But what kind of person is being indicated by such a tag which is after all self-selected; what identity work is involved is this kind of public disclosure? Is it easier to say what you don’t want than to be clear about what you do want? And if that’s true, what, in our culture, provokes and sustains such a stance?

Sorryimnotsorry has a wealth of ethical attitude embedded in it. A great post by Sandeep on the diacritics blog discusses the meme at length, noting that: ‘It’s the perfect little encapsulation of a pervasive attitude in our generation. Back off; it’s your problem that you have a problem with my conduct.’ As a legal scholar, Sandeep compares the sentiments expressed to the kinds of power that such legal strategies as excuse, justification, apology, and confession can have.

But I think it’s of a more general cultural tide that has been visible for some time. It’s a mixture of the tolerance of intolerance with the reductive solipsism of someone who has cherry-picked an extreme form of subjectivism from the more complex ideas of postmodernism/post-structuralism – “there’s no truth, there’s just me, which is OK, just as there’s just you and if we don’t agree then that’s OK too …. JUST DON’T CRITICISE ME … there’s no basis on which you could do so”.