The Symbolism of the Hash Tag

The Hatching Stroke and
the Ubiquity of Archetypal Design Thinking

#
I was walking the beach near my studios and found the above timber mark,
cross-hatched into a log,
the proverbial “pound” or number sign.
And I wondered about it.

“When this type of mark is made,
what meaning could it imply?”

As a designer and symbologist (yes, an invented word for a scholar of symbols,) the quest for the kernel of the original idea and patterning in consciousness—whether visual, textual, physical or psychic—is a perpetual listening, it’s that leaning-in, at full attention, an unbridled curiosity, to hear, absorb, learn, and know more.

Thinking along the line of
a symbolic statement in a mark,
you might look at that device and think: “container” or box.
Or the opening of a well, a framed portal.

Cataclasite, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

In Chinese, for example, a character variation on that, so-called gjing — is “well.” And that means a well in the context of an opening, like a mineshaft, that leads down to “something.” Could be water, could be mineral. Usually, a defining adjectival character will clarify what kind of opening it is. With a dot in the center of the cross-marked strokes usually connotes water.

gjing: well

井
But to the modeling and structure of the hatch-mark, this Han Dynasty
And Chinese modeling might be all the more relevant—a square well:

Exhibit in the Östasiatiska Museet, Stockholm, Sweden. Daderot, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

So in extending that exploration to our graphical history, what might it mean?
It is probably unlikely that anyone could actually point to an archetypal or symbolical origin to the device,
but given its original intention, as a numerical sign, one might infer that its history,

like the notion of hatching lines to count cattle
or other possession, is about numeration and counting.

Football savants know that hash lines speak to the specific
calibration of the field, as measures of advancement in the course of play.
The notion of “cross-hatching,” as a linear modeling of form, light and shadow by
intersecting parallel lines created in the 15th century. A drawing technique
that can be applied by pen, or with a burin in metal or boxwood for printmaking.
An exemplary benchmark would be Albrecht Dürer who worked as an artist
from the latter 1400s to the early 16th century.

Albrecht Dürer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Artists know that hatching refers to a drawing technique, scribing mass and form in the layering of longitudinal and latitudinal strokes. That persistent stroking might be relevant to the multitude of marks,
since “hash” is an etymological expansion on “hatch.”

And all of them are tied to “hacking” and hatchet. As in the hatched hash-tag in the opening image
at the top of this blog, that marking technique, making hash-marks is aligned to counting.

Why then would the hatch mark be linked to the hash tag?
Seemingly, a random moment of inspiration, as noted by Heather Brown:

It all started back on Aug. 23, 2007 with a tweet by San Francisco
techie and former Google developer Chris Messina.

He wrote on Twitter, “How do you feel about using # (pound) for groups. As in #barcamp [msg]?”

“It was one of those things where I had so many haters in the beginning that I thought this thing would never pick up,” he said in a recent interview with WCCO-TV. “But, secretly, I sort of felt like, Come on, guys, this is the simplest thing that could work.”
At first, Messina said he was dismissed by most in the tech
community, including Twitter, back when, before X.
“People were like, that’s weird, that’s kind of dumb. You do whatever your things is, and we’ll keep complaining about the problem,” he said.
He came up with the hashtag to find an easy way to bring together people discussing the same topic online.
He chose the # symbol because it was an easy keyboard character to reach on his 2007 Nokia feature phone.
and other techies were already using it in other internet chat systems.
“I didn’t need to invent something new,” he said. “This is good enough. I’m going to go with this.”
Two days later, another techie, Stowe Boyd, suggested the # symbol be called a hashtag.
“It just sounds catchier,” said Messina.

Thinking to archetype, in the original founding ideal —
the number or pound sign —
the hashtag becomes a kind of containment,
as Messina puts it, of
a shared community,
a gathering-in,
gathering-round
—to the well of new ideas.

A portal to the newly-found.
And, in allegory,
to the well, the refreshed.
The wellspring of the new. Brand.

Tim | GIRVIN Queen Anne Studios
…..

G I R V I N | SOCIALITY + MEDIATION
DESIGNING BRAND STORYTELLING IN HYBRID MEDIA

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