Raising Awareness of Conveyed Personality In Social Media Traces

TL;DR

This paper introduces PersonalityInsight, a tool that visualizes how users' past social media posts convey personality impressions, aiming to raise awareness and support impression management through computational analysis.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel psycho-linguistic visualization system for social media content that enhances user awareness of personality impressions conveyed by their posts.

Findings

Users found the tool increased awareness of personality conveyance

The system highlighted the need for actionable content modification suggestions

Design improvements are needed for better usability and impact

Abstract

Users' persistent social media contents like posts on Facebook Timeline are presented as an "exhibition" about the person to others, and managing these exhibitional contents for impression management needs intentional and manual efforts. To raise awareness of and facilitate impression management around past contents, we developed a prototype called PersonalityInsight. The system employs computational psycho-linguistic analysis to help users visualize the way their past text posts might convey impressions of their personality and allowed users to modify their posts based on these visualizations. We conducted a user study to evaluate the design; users overall found that such a tool raised awareness of the fact and the ways personality might be conveyed through their past content as one aspect of impression management, but that it needs design improvement to offer action-able suggestions for content modification, as well as careful thinking about impression management as one of many values people have about their digital past.