Why Do Wedding Hashtags Have Such Terrible Puns? - Core Post 5

Hashtags, for Losh, are about naming practices. Hashtags, like other digital objects we've discussed this semester, operate at multiple layers and scales: "hashtags. . .train the eye and set expectations about what to see," (56), they are naming practices, surfacing processes, and sources of noise. Tags are, like Chun's source code, a way of communicating with both machines and other users and, as Losh points out, can be applied to all sorts of ends. While not always explicit given the brevity of the book, Losh points repeatedly to the ways that power and its consequences flows through our tagging practices. I appreciated the conscious citational practice she is enacting as well as some of the historical references to modes of inscription and naming that predate the digital (I was struck by the short description of the water clock on pg. 100) and cross-cultural examples that take into account the global reach and instantiations of hashtags.

One hashtag phenomenon I find intriguing/annoying lately are wedding hashtags, where newlyweds coin a hashtag for guests to tag and organize their photos with. While I think this is a good way to create a crowdsourced wedding album, I often find that the tags feature a) truly awful puns and b) very heteronormative imagery: #GroomCaughtHisBride, #BrideFoundHerKeeper, #ShesAGroomsLastName, and more. Of course, I went to Etsy and, sure enough, you can have your hashtag printed in all sorts of media. I found several articles online that give couples  tips on constructing the best wedding hashtag (yes, you should bring back that cutesy pet name) or you can hire a professional to come up with a clever tag for you. Some even have hashtag generators (which the New York Times does not recommend, btw), one of which offered me gendered tag recommendations based on an intuition that the user of the site is a woman, who is assumed to be the one organizing wedding logistics, which now includes hashtags. The last name in the suggested tags is always pulled from the last name entered in the "fiance" box. This might be an example of the "domestication of the internet" Losh mentions (58), though in a different sense.