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A Study of Hashtags, A Digital Reliable Source During the COVID Period: An Anthropological and Linguistic Perspective
- Shri Vaishali
- Rukmini S
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Category: Uncategorized
Description: Hashtags, being mostly used as the label for social media content, also help in bringing the social media posts to its relevant categories and audience. Apart from categorizing and tagging the content of the post, hashtags do also serve as a reservoir of multilingual and multicultural take on a particular theme/event/scenario. However, the potentiality of hashtags in anthropological study is still unexplored in humanities research. The instance of COVID’19 and the eventual lockdown effected by the pandemic are also found to have contributed such multicultural content all over social media. The paper aims to study the potentiality of hashtags as a reservoir that stores the emotional and phenomenal characteristics of an event through the instance of COVID ’19. The paper specifically looks into the choice of words (which are norms of language), tone and activities of the hashtags related to COVID ’19 to study them. To study the potential of hashtags in humanities research, a total of 87 hashtags are found in instagram related to the pandemic, which are categorized into four major categories with regards to their semantic choices. The paper also extends itself to find the coping up strategies of people during the lockdown and the pandemic related neologisms and word formations that had been brought to common usage through the hashtags. The results suggest that hashtags can be used as a reliable source for anthropological and historical studies, as they give a clear account of the lifestyle of people, their opinions and the emotional and cultural aspects of a scenario.