InsightMe: Raising Awareness of Conveyed Personality in Social Media Traces

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 desired online image needs intentional and manual efforts. To raise awareness of and facilitate the management of conveyed personality image around past contents, we developed a prototype called InsightMe. 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 analysis. 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 actionable suggestions for content modification, as well as careful thinking about impression management as one of many values people have about their digital past.