Metadata or Metadiscourse? The Semiotic Misfire of the Hashtag

Doran, Martin & Zappavigna (2025: 138):

With respect to some of the novel features of social media multilogue, as a form of social metadata hashtags have the general capacity to bridge between individual and collective experience with implications for scoping. For example, in (30) individual feelings are linked to broader experiences across the social network.

(30) I feel like a bad mom but I totally brought C into bed with me last night...I was just so tired and I know he sleeps better and falls back to sleep faster next to me. It was only for 4hrs but I still feel the mom guilt. #secretsmomskeep #momguilt

In this post the source of the rendering is the author of the post, individualised as I, but this experience is collectivised through the hashtag #secretsmomskeep. This allows the mother to turn her specific experience into a generalisable truth that can be shared more widely. In addition to targeting the preceding verbiage as an evaluative metacomment, the hashtag links the particular secrets shared in the body of the post to other potential posts sharing the same hashtag. We can also interpret this as having a convoking function, calling together other mothers who have secrets to share using the same tag.

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Doran, Martin, and Zappavigna attribute to hashtags a “capacity to bridge between individual and collective experience,” positioning them as a kind of “social metadata” that shapes scoping. While intuitively appealing, this account slips across strata in ways that blur the line between contextual affordance and discourse semantic function.

In systemic functional terms, scope is not a resource of the digital medium but a meaning construed within language—a semantic pattern of collectivisation or individuation. Hashtags, however, operate primarily as indexical devices within the architecture of the platform: they categorise posts, connect them via algorithmic indexing, and create retrievability across user-generated content. When a user adds a tag such as #secretsmomskeep, they are not “linguistically collectivising” per se, but rather activating an infrastructural mechanism that can facilitate collectivisation discursively. The bridge between individual and collective thus occurs through an interplay of strata—contextual affordance (platform architecture) and discourse semantic construal (collectivising language)—not through the tag itself.

Moreover, by describing the hashtag as “targeting the preceding verbiage as an evaluative metacomment,” the authors treat it as if it were an in-text appraisal token. In practice, the hashtag’s evaluative force is usually inferential, dependent on platform conventions and communal uptake. It is not the tag’s inherent semantics but its metadiscursive circulation—the recursive indexing of meaning across texts—that collectivises affect and stance.

In short, hashtags do not “bridge” individual and collective meanings in themselves; they infrastructurally scaffold the conditions under which such bridging becomes semiotically possible. Treating them as discourse semantic resources within tenor collapses that distinction and risks mistaking algorithmic collectivity for semiotic community.