#Octothorpe

Richard Prince is selling art from other peoples' instagram accounts. #art #modern #photos #90,000 #reappropriation…

But what about the little hashtag symbol that lives on our screens and in our social media streams. 

The Octothorpe, as the professionals call it, is a survivor. Its origins are Roman and in this digital age we are still using it as a communications tool. Its use however has changed over the millennia.

The Libre Ponda, latin for a pound in weight, "17lb", now imagine jotting it down, scribbling it on a ships manifest or transcribing a complicated formula. It morphed into "#". On a side note the English pound symbol "£" is another form of "lb", neatly joining together the ℔ to create the modern symbol. 

Fast foward to the typewriter, the octothorpe survived this culling; the pilcrow and interabang didn't. And then the touch tone phone, the next leap forward for communications. The little octothorpe lives below the 9 and next to the zero. Why? because people could start speaking to computers, and dial past the first phone number, navigating through menus and entering information. 

Then 2007, two things happened that gave the symbol its current meaning; the hashtag. Firstly, Chris Messina, a UX designer,  chose to use this symbol for collating Twitter searches because he wanted a sign that could be input from a basic mobile phones. He had two options: octothorpe or asterisk. He chose the former. Secondly, a twitter coder wrote a single line of code which allowed its search engine group the posts together... 

The symbol has survived in this era because it allows us to communicate with computers, reading a tweet in a few years might sound like reading out a telegram today. STOP. We change our language to make it more computer friendly, but we need to invert this; the computer needs to be more friendly to our language. 

What will the Octothorpe symbol become to mean next?

Is it #instagrammable? - #not sure 

A great little read about wonderful symbols; Shady Characters.