Ryoma - Final Project

For my final project I decided to research and analyze something that was significant
to me in popular culture which are hashtags. I have never seen such a tool bring millions of
people together on social media through the use of certain words or phrases. For my thesis,
I am making the argument that hashtags are an important part of social media because it
brings to it an aspect of individuals having the ability to come up with words and phrases to
bring together a group of similarly like-minded people to market product or identify social
problems. For my artistic approach I decided to scour the internet and find 9 hashtags that I
think changed the world or united communities to take action on a particular matter1. With
these 9 hashtags I found pictures that were associated with the hashtags and created a 3x3
picture frame. My project incorporates a few concepts that we learned in class which include
citizen journalism, normalization, and social sphere. I believe citizen journalism has a
significant role in hashtags created for social justice issues because usually if groups of
people are being united by a hashtag such as #IceBucketChallenge it’s because the main
media is not doing its job of accurately and unbiasedly presenting the news. Frequently, the
main media does not fairly and equally portray victims the same because of race, nationality, ethnicity, or religion. Which leads me into another concept from class that I have
incorporated into my project which is normalization. Social relations between individuals
start to become normal because of ideology which makes established relationships of power
appear to be the natural order of things. This has started to frustrate black people in
particular because they would be portrayed very negatively in the news as a victim and
suspect when white people don’t get the same treatment which lead to hashtags such as
#BlackLivesMatter and #IfTheyGunnedMeDown. Lastly, I see the concept of social sphere to
have a role because hashtags give individuals power to come together and freely discuss
issues that are societal problems, and through it influence political action. Overall, I had a
great time making the media artifact because I was able to go back and find hashtags that
defined periods of time in the last couple years. I was able to analyze the importance of these
hashtags not just to society but the effect it had on mass media and social media.

1 Taurianen, J. (2015, March 20). 8 Hashtags that changed the world (thus far). Retrieved
November 15, 2015, from
http://www.hlntv.com/article/2015/03/20/hashtags-changed-world-
thus-far
Grasso, C. (2014, December 29). 10 Powerful Hashtag Campaigns of 2014, Because It Was A
Busy Year For Social Justice And Social Media. Retrieved November 15, 2015, from
http://www.bustle.com/articles/55806-10-powerful-hashtag-campaigns-of-2014-because-it-was-
a-busy-year-for-social-justice-and