#Nohashtagneeded

Dear overly used Hashtag,

We know that your original purpose was to categorize posts on twitter. It was a glorious start to your career, those early days on twitter. When you lived a carefree life of one to two word sentences like #manicmondays and #tacotuesdays. Back when people didn't understand how powerfully obnoxious you could be.

Like television and movie executives, who took advantage of your splendor to measure their viewing audiences and gain free advertising for live events. Soon celebrities used you to shamelessly plug their fragrance and clothing lines.

Suddenly, you were everywhere. And that's when you leapt off of the pages of twitter and entered all sources of social media. Soon, even facebook was using you, though you had no apparent use on facebook.  As you began to gain momentum, so did the length of your taglines. Soon, people started using only hashtags to update their statuses or would use you to create obnoxiously long run-on sentences.

And then, you poor poor hashtag, people started using you in their verbal, everyday conversations causing their intellect to look considerably lower. You became a pop-culture language phenomenon without even trying.

Yesterday, just when we thought the uses for you could not get more absurd, it happened. Someone actually hashtagged #nohashtagneeded. It was almost as complex as the "if a tree falls in a forest does it make a sound?" reference. If there truly was no hashtag needed, then why was one used? And just like that you became obsolete; a flash in the pan.

Of course there will still be some of us that use you dear hashtag, it's inevitable. Your subtle sarcasm and overused puns are too tempting not to use. But just so were clear, it is NOT necessary to use you to appear more interesting, smart or funny. We do not need to use more hashtags than actual words and we do not, I repeat DO NOT need to hashtag that we do not need to hashtag.

Just so we're clear on where the line is old . Hashy.
Best,
Erin #peaceout