Mike called me into the bedroom the other night while he was watching The Voice. They stream tweets on the bottom of the screen while the show airs, from the judges, host, etc.
Mike: Where are those notes coming from?
Me: Those are tweets.
Mike: Like, from Twitter?
Me: Yes.
Mike: Okay. Well, what are all those pound signs? What do they mean?
Me: They're hashtags.
Mike: What?
Me: We've talked about hashtags before! You click on them and can see all the people talking about that topic or you can even mute a hashtag so you never have to see those tweets in your timeline and...
Mike: WAIT, so does Twitter decide when to assign the pound sign? Like when it's a popular topic?
Me: You aren't getting this at all.
Mike: Why does that tweet have so many pound signs? I mean, I can't even make sense of that!
Me: THEY'RE HASHTAGS.
Mike: What?
Me: This isn't a conversation I'm particularly enjoying.
Mike: What do the @ symbols mean?
Me: I'm gonna go.