Blog 2: Navigating through the sea of #hashtags.

In lecture four Dr Victoria Kuttainen (2015) talks about how maps

reflect how we see the world, this is true but it also effects what we see. The Mercator map is a good example of  a map with the purpose of navigation, this map has the power lead people in the wrong direction and have people end up in places the might not want to be in, seeing things they might not want to see .

Wood, Kaiser and Abramms (2006, pp. 3) talk about the map the guard made to show directions to an auto repair shop, the map fulfilled its purpose and they arrived at the destination safely.  That being said they could have easily been miss led and arrived at a different location, after all they are trusting the directions of someone they don’t even know.

Tumblr also has its own form of navigation but instead in the form of a friendly guard and a hand drawn map it comes in the form of a hashtag and a search bar. The ability to hashtag a post you make gives the user the power to control how people find what they posted. A picture of an apple may be hashtaged as #apple #red #fruit and a picture of a lady in a bikini may also be hashtaged as #apple #red #fruit even though the colour red, apples and fruit are not related to a lady in a bikini at all.

The community creates the navigation system, how trust worthy is this community? How true are the maps? How trustworthy was the guard? This brings me back to the word purpose, does Tumblr’s navigation system help you find what you are looking for? Is the purpose fulfilled? In most cases yes but you will most likely also find things you weren’t looking for. As mentioned previously the community is in control of the navigation system and with all that power you are bound to have people abuse it and unnecessary hashtags are a result of this misused power.

References:

Denis Wood, Ward L. Kaiser and Bob Abramms.(2006).Seeing Through Maps:many ways to see the world. UK: New Internationalist Publications.

Kuttainen Victoria.(2015) BA1002: Our space: Networks narratives and the making of place, Lecture 4: Maps [Power point slides]. Retrieved from http://learnjcu.edu.au

Image:

Yoga Map(2009) Retrieved:  http://www.handmaps.org/contributor.php?ID=brittany_shoot