hashtags text by ANGELO FLACCAVENTO I must confess: I recently succumbed to the spell of the hashtag, writing captions for my vaguely cryptic Instagram posts with this verbally experimental form. One word, a noun or an accumulation of words crammed into one, held together by the hash [#] character at the beginning, hashtags look utterly, piercingly modern: fast and unremitting, they create clusters of mumblings, functioning as a uniquely pervasive way of drawing thematic paths and discernible freeways amid the vastness of the otherwise impenetrable totality of cyberspace. Attached like a label to a Facebook outburst, a quickfire tweet, an Instagram snap, or whatever one’s social media of choice requires, hashtags are something akin to a life vest: they save the fickle self-sufficiency of what one is willing to say to the global audience — should such audience be willing to know opinions about everything — from sinking into the dumb…