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Elizabeth Smart spoke for the first time about the role pornography played in her abduction in a new advocacy video posted on CNN. "He would just sit and look at it and stare at it, and he would just talk about these women, and then when he was done, he would turn and look at me, and he would be like, 'Now we're going to do this,'" Smart said referring to Brian Mitchell, who kidnapped Smart in 2002.In the five-minute video, Smart said, "Looking at pornography wasn't enough for him. Having sex with his wife after looking at pornography wasn't enough for him," she said. "He just always wanted more… I witnessed first-hand how damaging it is.”Shem Woo, a biology freshman from Singapore, said pornography is so prevalent and everyone has been exposed to it in one form or another. “Even if you try to avoid it, it will find you,” said Woo. “It is so destructive because online you can watch it a click away, but in real life, it’s not. You can’t just click and find a girl.” He said he is grateful for people like Smart who take a strong stand against pornography and help others see the consequences of a “simple decision to be involved in pornography.” According to CNN, Mitchell kidnapped 14-year old Smart from her bedroom in Salt Lake City, and chained her to a crude campsite in the mountains a few miles from her family’s home. Mitchell raped Smart over and over again for the next nine months while her family frantically searched for her, till she was found on a street in Sandy, Utah in 2003. Smart said Mitchell regularly looked at pornography, which "just led to him raping me more." The now 28-year-old woman says in the new video suggested that porn drove Mitchell to steal and violate her.Princess Donato, an exercise and sports science senior from Qatar, said she has seen pornography destroy families and one's ability to identify lust from love. “I think all of us at some point in our lives will be tempted and Satan wants us to be curious and think it’s an artwork or appreciation for the human body, but it just leads us to so many mistakes and heartaches,” said Donato. Donato added how it was important to realize we cannot be completely shielded from pornography because of technology and social media. “But we need to have courage to stop. We need to know what to do when we deal with it,” said Donato. Sharing how pornography made her “living hell worse,” Smart talked about a specific experience with Mitchell, whom Smart does not name but instead refers to 8as her “captor.”"My captor was really excited and really kind of amped up about something, and he said, 'Oh, you know, I have something and I'm going to show it to you, and you have to look at it,'" Smart said. Mitchell then pulled out a "magazine full of hard-core pornography," she said. "It just led to him raping me more, more than he already did — which was a lot.”Maryann Phillips, a sophomore studying education from Washington, said she felt sad to see how pornography caused Smart a lot of pain. “It’s a big problem even in church, because it’s so addictive and we should stay away from it,” said Phillips. “It will be hard because it is in music videos, lyrics, movies and everywhere, but we have leaders, friends and family to help.”Smart, a devout Mormon, is now an advocate for child safety as the director of the Elizabeth Smart Foundation. The video, posted to YouTube, was produced by Fight the New Drug, an anti-porn non-profit group.

The online and social media tidal wave known as Twitter has spread microblogging far and wide and with it contextual clues known as hashtags. A hashtag is a form of metadata preceded by the symbol #. Metadata is a fancy word for a tag, of which there is more than one type. Hashtags in particular express the content of a given message. This was originally meant to be helpful on sites such as Twitter, where messages are limited to one hundred and forty characters or less. This trendy phenomenon has become immensely common not only on Twitter but also on such sites as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Youtube. Hashtags have recently diffused through oral chitchat as well. Wikipedia contains lengthy historical information on the subject. According to this site, the hashtag piggybacked to popularity through Twitter, but its origin lies farther back on the technological timeline when it was used in IRC (Internet Relay Chat) networks to label groups and topics.By placing a hashtag before, in, or after a message, a user can attribute that message to any number of relevant categories and concepts. Wikipedia states, “In a tagging system, there are an unlimited number of ways to classify an item, and there is no ‘wrong’ choice. Instead of belonging to one category, an item may have several different tags.” A large number of tags placed as postscripts (meaning they come after the message, as opposed to before or within) is the most common form of tagging on Twitter. This brings up the question of whether the content of the message is being expressed through the hashtags, or whether the hashtags in their diversity and quantity carry the content themselves. Tarryn Russon, a sophomore in psychology from California, commented, “People put way too many hashtags on what they’ve already said. I don’t really use them unless it’s sarcastically.”The most prevalent of hashtag humor stems from the show “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon,” aired on NBC. Fallon recently churned out a comedic skit in which he and Justin Timberlake overuse the hashtag in a verbal conversation and are told to shut up by an annoyed Questlove (drummer of the band The Roots), who enters the scene at the very end. “Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake are hilarious,” said Chase Beal, junior in marine biology from Utah, commenting on the skit. “But the video still brings up the problem of the oversimplification of the English language.” Beal said he is convinced there is a definite lack of eloquence in language commonly written and spoken by recent generations of Americans. Fallon also features a segment called latenight #hashtags, in which he reads out the Twitter responses to a hashtag tweeted by him earlier in the day. For example, responses are read to such hashtags as #MyRoommateIsWeird, #BeachFail, #ItsSoHot, and #FakeJayZLyrics. Often the featured hashtag elicits so many responses from Fallon fans that it becomes a worldwide trending topic in less than half an hour.Another purpose of the hashtag includes acting as a beacon in order for users to “follow” the subject or put it on a list for other microbloggers to find. James Constantino, a freshman in Biology from California, explained, “I use hashtags to keep up on music artists and videogames. They’re helpful because through them I’m able to find people with my same interests.” Used for the purpose of sarcasm, common interest, or expressing content, the widespread use of the hashtag is silently dominating the arena of social media. This is reinforced by the fact that an average of five hundred million messages per day are sent worldwide—and that’s just on Twitter.