I wish hashtags packed a more meaningful punch

I searched for “maximalist” on Poshmark today when I really meant to search for some combination of anime, Ran Kotobuki, Fruits Magazine, and that first time I had a warm custard taiyaki from a street vendor on a cold Tokyo day in Ikebukuro.

This sudden urge to shop from my nostalgia came via one of Mina Le’s latest videos. She’s an excellent fashion YouTuber for the casual nerd; she breaks down trends while reflecting on capitalism, whiteness, subculture, gender, and sustainability. This particular video was on maximalism’s rebound among Gen Z. Le featured images and clippings of Harajuku fashion and its media like Fruits magazine, which transported me back to my childhood in the 1990s. While Tokyo streetwear isn’t aren’t necessarily the direct inspiration of Gen Z’s take on maximalism, the bold colors, chunky plastic jewelry, and rebellious, joyful excessive expression are held in common. Seeing Gen Z’s remix of maximalist fashion brought back memories of the time I watched SuperGals!, or my days of dreaming that I’d one day purchase my own platform boots from an indie store in the alleyways surrounding Yoyogi Park.

By the time I made the journey to Japan in 2012, of course, very few remnants of the Harajuku street fashion era remained. Fast fashion had taken Tokyo. But in 2022, Gen Z remains spiritually true to maximalism’s Harajuku incarnation. It is sustainable, thrifted, playful, and centered on building outfits that are wholly unique to the individual. It’s a new rebellion against the must-have looks and items donned by every influencer, whether micro or celebrity.

It’s joyful. It’s creative. It’s fun. It’s inspired.

So, I searched both “maximalism” and “maximalist” on Poshmark. I expected funky thrifted items, ideally lightly styled or staged to inspire me, the buyer. Instead I found rather bland listings. There was a pair of pink beaded earrings I liked, and a y2k denim bag that I’m sure came from JCPenney. On their own, these items weren’t not maximalist; but that inspired nostalgia I felt from the Instagram and TikTok clips on Mina Le’s video didn’t follow me to the Poshmark app. There, the keyword was, from my perspective, without meaning. (In contrast, the maximalism hashtag on Instagram led me to many potential products I liked.)

Taxonomies represent how we codify knowledge. Ontologies are an assertion of what is true, real, or validated. But in the effort to be discrete and “objective” in defining meaning, we lose so much of what makes meaning meaningful. In the absence of human-experiential-sensorial meaning, I’m left wanting more from digital experiences.

In my work, we use taxonomies and named entities in combination with keywords to form clusters of meaning. While these meanings have a pedagogical purpose that can be decoded, other cognitive styles or experiences of that defined “meaning” aren’t captured. They sit outside the scope of perspectives for which we design meaning in the product.

Take, for example, this short clip of Barack Obama’s speech on climate change at the United Nations.

The title of the video, “Barack Obama at #COP26: ‘We can secure a better future’ | UN Climate Change”, offers some context. But the hashtags in the description (just three) are redundant: #COP26 #UNClimateChange #BarackObama.

If I were adding meaning to this video, I’d likely add more terms from a controlled vocabulary, such as Politics / International Relations / United Nations / Environmentalism / Political Speeches. But meaning-making doesn’t stop there. A growing list of discrete terms and entities creates a cluster of meaning, but it does nothing to capture the emotion or experience of its meaning.

Barack Obama’s speech is attempting to communicate the urgency of addressing climate change to the United Nations while in Glasgow. Though his tone is grave, he offers a call to action that we can design a better future. There is hope.

Though descriptive, even stating these connections between terms doesn’t acknowledge my experience of this content as a person. Climate change is the topic, but its many consequences and connections are conjured up in my mind at its very mention.

Before I’ve watched the video, the topic of climate change in the title stirs me. I feel empathy for the devastation families must feel over the loss of their ancestral farmland; the desperate grief that drives migrants; the anxiety and panic felt for the future by global youth. I imagine eroded soil, swelling plastic seas, and red skies of California. My reaction to the subject matter alone is a tangled and relational mess.

So many ways of knowing are embodied experiences. They may be emotion, imagination, memory, or empathy. Each comes with their own physical and sensorial aspects. In the same way that I sought the maximalism hashtag on Instagram for the nostalgia of Japanese streetwear in 1999, I read a term like “climate change” in metadata and make dozens of compounding connections.

The same could be said for any number of these discrete entities named. What are the varying, complex, and emotional experiences of reading “Barack Obama” as a hashtag? Or “United Nations”? Are there images of war, celebration, peace, or protest? What is felt by the person encountering words? Anger, betrayal, fear, hope, trust, sadness?

Feminist epistemology argues for a situated knowledge, essentially an awareness that we reflect knowledge as a knower. We perceive, experience, and validate according to our individual ways of knowing. Our gender, class, race, sexuality, traumas, or political stances all contribute in threatening science’s quest for objectivity. What is known, then, could be seen to be as fluid as the knower.

Returning to metadata, I don’t know how a taxonomy, ontology, or other controlled vocabulary could ever capture the various and seemingly infinite cognitive responses to clusters of meaning. Within a specific domain, this is easier. In building these clusters for educators and teachers, I can more easily empathize with a specific persona and ultimately utilize language of purpose, meaning, and feeling that they already share.

But I have to admit that I sometimes wonder to what end this is useful. A project of this nature will never cease so long as there are new named entities and social change. In my case, incorporating these abstract and conceptual meaning-making approaches to keywords actually does solve a problem. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that YouTube or Poshmark need to. (Though I suspect Instagram does some of this by means of other data.)

Either way, for the right search box in the right product, a feminist epistemology could be one foundation from which to build an ontology that better reflects us.

Originally written in 2022