What's with the #DrinkMilitia hashtag for tea bloggers?
As a follow-up to the recent forum thread on how tea bloggers get samples to review, I have a question about how some bloggers promote their reviews on social media.
What is up with the #DrinkMilitia hashtag? I’m seeing it used a lot on Twitter, but I only started noticing it recently.
Where did it start? Who created it? why on earth do so many bloggers think that using a hashtag with the word “militia” in it is a smart idea? I really doubt that using a word with such negative, militaristic overtones is good for promoting something we enjoy so much.
Seriously, am I alone in thinking this term is problematic?
I think for me, I didn’t take it so literally – any more than if it said #teaarmy I wouldn’t think of it as an actual militaristic term.
I agree with marzipan, I don’t think it’s meant as a militaristic term. I think it’s just to illustrate being seriously into tea, like having strict tea drinking habits. Just like some of us use #teaporn on Instagram, lol, not meant to offend anyone ;-)
Personally, I’m not offended by it.
To me it’s kind of inline with the term “Grammar Nazi”. No one really says it in a way that means “Oh, you like grammar and you’re a proud Hitler supporter/sympathizer”. It’s just hyperbole used to exaggerate (like TheTeaFairy pointed out) how seriously/ritualistically many tea bloggers take their subject material.
Huh. I guess I’m an outlier. It’s just the term is so new to me, so I’m really thrown by it.
It’s a website for promoting people who are passionate about coffee and tea. They’ve done seasonal interviews of bloggers and sellers, though I think the last interview was Winter 2015.
Whoever runs it has a hashtag set up, so if you tweet with the hashtag, it gets retweeted by Drink Militia. I do the interviews as I like doing interviews, but I don’t often do the tag as I run out of twitter characters.
Why should the word militia have a negative connotation anyway, they did defend Lexington and Concord before they had a modern connotation. They were the original citizen soldiers. Not military in the modern sense.
I always use #DrinkMilitia on Twitter because they repost my blog posts to lots of other tea drinkers and tea companies. They have also interviewed me, along with other tea lovers that I follow. It’s just a handy tool for promotion. I don’t think of ‘militia’ as overly militaristic in this case. I find it kind of funny… picture an army of tea-drinkers… tea-grannies, as my mother calls me… sitting on a battlefield knitting socks and reading long novels. It could change the world!
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