Love #Actually

It’s almost a week old now, but I was thinking today about a tweet that I saw from Jamelle Bouie:

Specifically, I was thinking about the way that #actually functions there. There’s been plenty of work done on what my friend Alice has called the metacommunicative properties of hashtags, the way that this punctuation mark accomplishes semantic purpose beyond its original function linking individual tweets to topical channels.

And there’s certainly some of that here. On its face, the hashtag on actually functions not unlike scare quotes, providing an ironic twist on the “reality” of the claim in which it’s embedded.

But there’s something else going on, I think. I wish I’d saved it, but another friend tweeted the other day about how the word “actually” has been effectively drained of its denotative capacity — we can no longer use it unselfconsciously. So it’s not just that the word here is being tweaked with a hashtag; instead, I think that what’s being captured is an entire (recent) history of use, and the way that it was deployed by certain people (and later mocked and memed by others) in a sprawling, online storm of discourse.

Hashtagging #actually evokes the iceberg for which that word is the tip. And in this sense, this particular use reminds me of the way that Steven Johnson, way back in his book Interface Culture, described the way they used links at Suck, as “layered, associative syntax” that produced condensed, ironic prose. The hashtag doesn’t really link to that material, since no one who used it sincerely would have tagged it in that fashion. And the point isn’t to venture into a separate channel where all the ironic uses of #actually are compiled. But it ends up adding a density to the tweet that struck me as significant. So make of that what you will.