Hashtag #Anxiety

To tag or not to tag

Do you freestyle? Use a dictionary? Do you have any tagging anxiety? 

Do you take tagging seriously--or are you a little bit playful? Maybe even irreverent.

I'm an anxious tagger--or maybe an ambivalent tagger. When I send out Instagrams on a work account, I'm a circumspect, super-cautious tagger. A conservative, barebones-minimum tagger who tries to avoid #synonymy and irreverent tagging.

But for fun--i.e., with the Zara work jacket off and the sweats on, along with the veil of anonymity--I'm noticing that I'm much more fast and loose with tags. Basically, it's fun to play with tags. To create some new ones, to search out the ones flying around Twitter, and to try to jump in and see where the tag takes you. 

Who knew, for example, that #WomensHistoryMonth is one of the most popular hashtags on Twitter? A month after Women's History Month, I retweeted a WHM-hashtagged story I thought was pretty amazing from the Smithsonian--a video, actually, about the Delta Sigma Theta sorority and their mission to bring books to the segregated South:



With that single retweet, and maybe thanks to the #WomensHistoryMonth hashtag--one of the most liked hashtags on Twitter--I was followed by a fellow alum from my (very small) undergrad. We did not know each other--separated by a decade or so--but we were suddenly connected by a likeminded tag. 

Interesting. 

The power of the tag. 

Albeit, the Smithsonian did the tagging. I just did the retweeting on that one. 

To circle back to tagging anxiety and tagging freedom:

How do you tag? Do you have a different tagging style for work versus school or home? Are you a different tagger on and off duty? 


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