Chanting Hashtags and Hashtagging Chants
More thoughts on hashtags: what does it mean that so many, like #BlackLivesMatter and #ICantBreathe, are also chants?
One of the most striking aspects of protests in recent weeks is the interplay of hashtags on the internet, hashtags written on signs, and chants of those same hashtags. Are we hashtagging our chants or chanting our hashtags? Does it matter? The connections between spoken voice, written signs, and typed-out hashtags reflects the increasingly intertwined actions of physical and online protests.
In my previous piece, I wrote about how you can’t speak a hashtag; you have to write it down for it to be an obvious hashtag. But the sheer number of hashtags becoming chants got me thinking of the spoken utterance. In the era of social video services, from short form sites like Instagram and Vine to livestreaming sites, a chant expressed in physical space can quickly join the online chorus of written and spoken utterances, and vice versa.
Here are a few examples, some from my observations on the ground at Millions March Oakland (I tried to make video collages to get at the point more) and some from poking around on the web, from different cities. I’ve been struck, while witnessing actions in the Bay Area, by how seamlessly the digital, written and spoken experiences mesh together. I used hashtags to find some of the examples below, and as you watch these, pay attention to the Vines in particular—the loopiness of Vine helps extend the chants into, well, infinity.
#BlackLivesMatter
I’ll get to the origins of Black Lives Matter in a little bit, but note the repetition on the woman’s shirt to the left —kind of like a chant.
#ICantBreathe
“I Can’t Breathe” recreates the final words of Eric Garner, whose death by a police officer’s chokehold was filmed and uploaded to YouTube.
#NoJusticeNoPeace
“No Justice No Peace” and “Know Justice Know Peace” are common protest chants and slogans that predated the hashtag, but it’s nevertheless worth noting how often it’s used as a hashtag now as well.
#ShutItDown
“If we don’t get it, shut it down” has been a common chant at rallies—in other words, “If we don’t get justice, shut down the system.” The chant you hear in this video also includes the names of individuals who have died. At protest events, the names of those who passed are often transformed into hashtags, like #MikeBrown and #EricGarner.
#HandsUpDontShoot
“Hands Up Don’t Shoot” is both a memetic gesture and a chant, referencing reports of Mike Brown having died by police gunfire while his hands were up.
The development of a hashtag as a chant/slogan and a chant/slogan as a hashtag is an intentional strategy. The #BlackLivesMatter hashtag meme started as a bridge between two friends and activists—Alicia Garza and Patrice Cullors—in Oakland and Los Angeles, and they grew it, with co-founder Opal Tometti into an advocacy organization for a variety of black people’s lives - queer, trans, male, female, immigrant, and others.
The web site for Black Lives Matter further indicates the founders’ intentionality with how they structured the slogan:
We have put our sweat equity and love for Black people into creating a political project–taking the hashtag off of social media and into the streets. The call for Black lives to matter is a rallying cry for ALL Black lives striving for liberation.
I suspect the digital-physical interaction of hashtag, chant, and written slogan is part of what has given #BlackLivesMatter its staying power. The phrase itself also serves as a form of microaffirmation, made effective in its accumulation. As Garza noted on NPR, “And so I think the note [I originally posted on Facbeook] was something like, black people, I love you, I love us, we got us and our lives matter.” To a certain degree, each utterance of “Black Lives Matter” reflects her intent of affirmation.
As the videos collected above show, so many other chants and slogans are also hashtags (or is it that hashtags are also chants and slogans?)—#ICantBreathe, #NoJusticeNoPeace, #ShutItDown, #HandsUpDontShoot. I’m sure we can think of others, and I’m sure each one has its own origin story worth studying.
Are hashtags the protest chants of the social web?
After observing Chinese human rights activists using internet memes to evade censorship, I started thinking of internet memes as the “street art of the social web”—remix-ready, irreverent, visual voices of the people. As early as 2011 and 2012, both Chinese and African American activists have innovated with memes to raise awareness about important social issues (see my article on this).
And now, I wonder if hashtags are effectively becoming the protest chants and/or sign slogans of the social web. Hashtags have interesting social properties baked into their design that resemble many of the benefits of chants, most particularly in their communal quality. As Twitter hashtag originator Chris Messina wrote in his original visioning of the concept, hashtagging, like chanting, is a very public act, one that increases visibility and broadens the community of participants:
Every time someone uses a channel tag to mark a status, not only do we know something specific about that status, but others can eavesdrop on the context of it and then join in the channel and contribute as well. Rather than trying to ping-pong discussion between one or more individuals with daisy-chained @replies, using a simple #reply means that people not in the @reply queue will be able to follow along, as people do with Flickr or Delicious tags.
Both well-constructed hashtags and chants are easy to remember. They’re repetitive, they create bonds between people through that repetition, and through the call and response inherent intheir structure. Indeed, there’s something powerful about hearing people chanting in unison, just as there’s something so powerful about seeing all the results of a Vine page or Twitter stream based on a hashtag search (but not all the results are supportive — like in a physical protest, the internet is never fully unified). Both are public acts.
You might argue that hastags are not quite protest chants. And you’d be right. You can’t search a chant, for instance, by clicking on it (duh). Chants are visceral and physical, while hashtags are searchable and extensible. Both go viral each time someone uses them. My point is not to create a definitive analogy but to ask a simpler question, “In what way can hashtags be effective in social movements?” We’ve seen them used to organize around topicality, as we saw with #jan25 and #occupywallst, and that function hews closely to the original concept of topicality on Twitter and in IRC.
I admit the analogies with the physical world are ultimately a little reductive, but analogies help lead us toward a conceptual framework for how people are using new technologies and, more importantly, how they’re utilizing internet-native cultural practices in their work. I like analogies because they can help break down the “asphalt fetishism” (the privileging of physical space over digital) that Zeynep Tufekci has written about and get to the heart of what digital action can look like.
I do think we’re starting to see how else hashtags can be used: as part of the emotive, social practices that are so essential to movements. Like chants, they can affirm, unify, and create a social space across geographies, across the web, across everyone involved in a movement, whether digitally or physically. If you’ve ever stood in the middle of a group of people chanting, you know that’s powerful, unifying stuff.
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