Languages constantly evolve: each year new words, definitions, and changes to rules of grammar are made. But only in the last decade has one company had so much control over how language is used, and the future of communication has been significantly altered as a result.

Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake gave us all a laugh about the use of hashtags in social media. It was an obvious weak point in society to make fun of. But look at this without the mocking tone and you’re only a couple degrees away from concluding that this is the direction human language and communication are going. That’s not quite as funny.

As silly as speaking in hashtag seems, it makes sense, at least while communicating online in a one to many context. If you broadcast something to your network, you want it to be seen, and shared, and usually you do that through a website or mobile app. The content you create and share is then taken apart by many software applications designed to make meaning out of it. The use of hashtags came about, among other reasons, to improve communication through those algorithms and increase the method we can broadcast with. Your interests and the content subject category are just a couple derivatives that will be deducted from a Facebook post by programs constantly crawling and indexing the internet. Hashtags are effective because they tell other applications that you want your content to be shared with that keyword, or category, or channel.

“Okay that’s great” you think, “but I don’t use hashtags in my emails, blog posts, Facebook messages etc. What does this have to do with me?”

Well, even without using hashtags, if you use the Internet, you are inundated with marketing content, blog posts, news articles, and other various attempts to grab your attention. All of that is optimized for search engines. Why? Because everyone wants their content to be found more. Each time the online marketing community learns more about optimization for search engines: they change their style guides, focus on using keywords a certain number of times, shorten page titles, limit the number of hyperlinks they use. No one except maybe a handful of Google engineers know all the rules, but a lot of people are constantly trying to crack the code and reverse engineer them!

No matter what, if you use the internet, you will end up taking that content in. Either directly by reading it, passively by skimming it unintentionally, or via someone else regurgitating it to you after they took it in. And this unfortunately just happens, you have no control. Well you have a little, you could avoid human contact, or move somewhere to live among the 4+ billion people on planet earth who still don’t come into contact with the Internet.

Bottom line is, exposure to online content is inevitable, and it will have an affect on you.

It’s not all one sided though. Search engines consistently tweak their algorithms to identify and give lift to high quality content. Doing that makes their search results better. It improves the quality of their product, which keeps traffic coming. And it enables them to profit from advertising. Unfortunately, it’s is also the case that content creators adapt their style to have better visibility in the search results, not the other way around. (I have yet to hear of a change in PageRank™ that was derived from respect for better writing style. )

The rules that determine who gets a better position in search results inevitably decides the fate of visibility, and exposure for content in the Internet. It also steers how we write headlines, how long or short our posts are, whether we directly mention a brand name or set of product attributes, and so on. Sure, no one person is calling the shots. But the push and shove between search engines and content creators for better search results is guiding what we read, share, talk about, and even think about.

So where does that put us in 10 years? Or better yet, 25? Will we communicate in a method optimized more for digital utilization rather than our individual motivations?