Core post 4 - Hashtags, pointers, and NULL

I was very impressed with the multiplicity of meanings/histories/frames that Losh brings to bear in her analysis of the hashtag. I want to use this post to think some of these overloaded (to use the programming term) functions together, specifically around the production social space. Her observations lead me to see hashtags within several spatial contexts: as a virtual space in the sense of a Habermasian public sphere wherein people produce slogans, conduct representational, hijack hashtags that they find offensive or dangerous; a digital space on Twitter’s servers; and often these two types of space are coterminous with a physical space, as her example of the hashtag-themed bar, or #OccupyWallStreet and #Maidan seem to indicate. The way Twitter visualizes hashtags as a endless scroll of related tweets contained within their own unique webpage has always predisposed me to view hashtag collections in spatial terms.

But it struck me in thinking about this yesterday that on the level of code a hashtag does not represent an actual space (as in a location in memory) but functions as a pointer (or rather a collection of pointers)—a pointer is a kind of map that leads the computer to a certain space in memory, an additional level of abstraction that allows the programmer to have readable code that is simultaneously accessible to the computer hardware. I think this is a useful metaphor for thinking about hashtags because it allows us to think more accurately about the way in which hashtags produce social space: they are not the public square, either physically or in terms of discourse, but more function like road signs. They make pathways legible, and indicate a possible route to a desired destination, although multiple pathways exist and some are more frequented than others. They do not in themselves produce space, but manage and direct.

This metaphor helps also to place hashtags in conversation with Gaboury’s notion of “Becoming NULL” from last week. NULL as a concept is only legible from the point-of-view of pointers and references. NULL is a pointer without a reference, an indication that something should exist at a given location, but what is found is illegible to the computer (and to the programmer), which will usually cause the program to crash. Losh overloaded reading reveals many heterogeneities and contradictions in the way hashtags are used, hijacked, misunderstood, evolve, etc. I think this is a great example of the idea of NULL at work.