How to Plant the Seed of Cultural Change
By Alice Schroeder
The internet — the platform for freedom of expression. Free expression is important, but what if no one can hear you? What can it change?
We need to do something! We need a solution: something massive, highly sophisticated, something big, something like… the #.
Wait the #? That’s it? Wasn’t it always there?
No! And its inventor is Chris Messina (You can google it in case you don’t believe me).
The symbol, back in 2005 was just the unused lower right button on everyone’s cell phone — yes cell phone, the thing where you had to press three times to get one letter. Unused, doesn’t mean useless — Chris saw it as an opportunity to give it a role. A big role, for a small symbol. Giving people a voice that actually could be heard. Enabling you to discover content relevant for you and to share ideas on the internet that could be challenged by others.
So, Twitter didn’t come up with it?
Nope! They actually refused it in the first place… Chris introduced it anyways to humankind.
That the # was on a greater mission to change the world, you could see already in its early days: Nate Ritter was trying to help the San Diego community during the wildfires in October 2007. He was tweeting restlessly about the evolvement of the fires, but he wasn’t heard. That is when his friend Chris and the little symbol came in to help… Quickly people started copying Nates #sandiegofire, helping the community and starting the success story of the #.
Now you might think: this must have made Chris very successful. And you are right, but not in financial terms… Its success is measured in how many lives it is affecting today. And that are a lot! Every second 2,300 Hashtags are used. That’s 200,000,000 per day. That is an enormous amount of influence.
Let’s influence the whole world!
Sounds a bit like the plan of a super villain, right? So, Chris needed to make sure that the # would become a superhero. How did he do that? He asked himself a highly important question that everyone who wants to change the world should ask him- or herself!
How do I make sure that the technology that I am giving out to humankind is changing it for the better? Which values do I want to design into the core of the technology? Because when it is spreading it is spreading the values around the globe.
In the case of the # we are talking about three core values, it should be viral, decentralized and generative.
Chris decided to make the # open source, to not set barriers for its adoption. This way users on #Twitter where able to copy it easily and #Instagram was able to implement it later, to introduce a search function. This boosted adoption immensely.
With that a behavioral change followed, that not even Chris was able to foresee. The # started bringing people together online and offline. First sharing interests, later careers and success stories.
Today we can’t think about a life without it! It became a part of our daily life, a design element, art and more important symbol for cultural change: #MeToo #BlackLivesMatter #ASLIceBucketChallenge and #FridaysforFuture are only a few important ones to mention. Today the # creates awareness, discussion and changes to the status quo.
Planting the seed for cultural change, so society can blossom — that should be at the core of every technology that is about to change the world. The moral behind the story of the # is: our wealth lies in human relationships. Oh…and never underestimate the small ones!
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