{"id":374725,"date":"2010-03-01T04:36:39","date_gmt":"2010-03-01T09:36:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu\/nll\/?p=2150"},"modified":"2010-03-01T04:36:39","modified_gmt":"2010-03-01T09:36:39","slug":"the-half-life-of-the-hashtag","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/374725","title":{"rendered":"The half-life of the hashtag"},"content":{"rendered":"

Stefano Bertolo points us to Rob Cottingham’s latest Noise To Signal<\/a>:
\n\"\"
\n<\/span>
\nRob’s comment:<\/p>\n

You know those time-lapse videos that compress days, weeks or years into minutes? The ones with flowers budding, blooming and then withering in seconds? Or late-1990s Silicon Valley startups getting venture capital, blowing it on espresso bathtubs and Dr. Pepper fountains, and vanishing into receivership?<\/span><\/p>\n

I think Twitter may be the same thing, except for language. In spoken English, it can take decades \u2013 even centuries \u2013 for new words to emerge, become part of common parlance, and then fade into disuse.<\/span><\/p>\n

But on Twitter, hashtags can live that entire lifecycle in the course of a day or two. A news story breaks, and competing hashtags vie for dominance. Then a few influential folks adopt the same one. Suddenly the conversation coalesces around it, the term trends, the spammers start using it, and then the conversation peters out as we move on to the next topic.<\/span><\/p>\n

Is that the pattern? And how closely does it map onto the ways that words and phrases earworm their way into spoken language?<\/span><\/p>\n

Maybe some up-and-coming linguistics student is already mapping the ways hashtags rise and decay, and getting ready to publish a dissertation\u2026 in 140-character increments.<\/span><\/p>\n

Yet another opportunity for in silico social science<\/em>…<\/p>\n

[And just in case you were wondering, this is not<\/em> the first example of the construction “earworm its|their way into\u00a0 __”<\/a>.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stefano Bertolo points us to Rob Cottingham’s latest Noise To Signal: Rob’s comment: You know those time-lapse videos that compress days, weeks or years into minutes? The ones with flowers budding, blooming and then withering in seconds? Or late-1990s Silicon Valley startups getting venture capital, blowing it on espresso bathtubs and Dr. Pepper fountains, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4144,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-374725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4144"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=374725"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374725\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=374725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=374725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=374725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}