Raising Awareness of Conveyed Personality In Social Media Traces
This addresses impression management challenges for social media users, though it is incremental as it builds on existing psycho-linguistic methods.
The researchers tackled the problem of users' lack of awareness about how their past social media posts convey personality impressions, developing a prototype called PersonalityInsight that uses psycho-linguistic analysis to visualize these impressions and allow post modifications; a user study found it raised awareness but needed design improvements for actionable suggestions.
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.