Get to know your social media persona

ThinkUp analyses how people conduct themselves on Twitter and Facebook, and helps them become less reflexive and more professional, says Farhad Manjoo

Anil Dash, a long-time tech entrepreneur and blogger, was recently studying a list of the top words he had used on Twitter over the course of a month during the fall.

Dash has a half million followers on Twitter, and like a lot of people in tech and media circles, he uses the social network to chat with colleagues, to pontificate about technology, politics and pop culture, and to participate in a lot of in-jokes.

Over the years Dash has also found himself in the middle of some of the most loaded controversies that have roiled that network. But when he looked at the list of his most-used words for that month, he decided that many of his tweets were too combative, and he wasn’t proud of that.

“A lot of it was me dealing with 'gamergate’ folks,” he said in an interview, referring to this year’s anti-feminist activist campaign by some video game enthusiasts. “I’m like: 'God, I’m wasting my life. Why am I spending time on this?' There are so many other things I could be doing.'” But, he added: “Seeing it was a revelation. I decided I’m just not doing it anymore. I immediately blocked five people, and it made my life better in 10 seconds.”

Dash has been thinking about his behaviour on social media for a while. Together with Gina Trapani, the former editor of the blog Lifehacker, he is a co-founder of ThinkUp, a year-old subscription service that analyses how people comport themselves on Twitter and Facebook, with the goal of helping them become more thoughtful, less reflexive, more empathetic and more professional - overall, better behaved.

In addition to a list of people’s most-used words and other straightforward stats like follower counts, ThinkUp shows subscribers more unusual information such as how often they thank and congratulate people, how frequently they swear, whose voices they tend to amplify, and which posts get the biggest reaction and from whom.

Some of this may sound trivial. But after using ThinkUp for about six months, I’ve found it to be an indispensable guide to how I navigate social networks.

Every morning the service delivers an email packed with information, and in its weighty thoroughness, it reminds you that what you do on Twitter and Facebook can change your life, and other people’s lives, in important, sometimes unforeseen ways. ThinkUp is something like Elf on the Shelf for digitally addled adults - a constant reminder that someone is watching you, and that you’re being judged.

That is the point. “The goal is to make you act like less of a jerk online,” Trapani said. “The big goal is to create mindfulness and awareness, and also behavioural change.”

She pointed out that people often tweet and update without any perspective about themselves. That’s because Facebook and Twitter, as others have observed, have a way of infecting our brains. Because social networks often suggest a false sense of intimacy, they tend to lower people’s self-control. Like a drug or perhaps a parasite, they worm into your devices, your daily habits and your every free moment, and they change how you think.

For those of us most deeply afflicted, myself included, every mundane observation becomes grist for a 140-character quip, and every interaction a potential springboard into an all-consuming, emotionally wrenching flame battle.

“There’s a knee-jerk thoughtlessness and lack of empathy that you have because you’re online, because you’re not looking at people’s faces,” Trapani said.

One of the biggest dangers is saying something off the cuff that might make sense in a particular context, but that sounds completely off the rails to the wider public. The problem, in other words, is acting without thinking - being caught up in the moment, without pausing to reflect on the long-term consequences. You’re never more than a few taps away from an embarrassment that might ruin your career, or at least your reputation, for years to come.

Being made aware of that - getting a daily reminder from ThinkUp that there are good ways and bad ways to behave online - has a tendency to focus the mind.

Thanks to ThinkUp’s nudging, I tend to amplify more people in my feed - that is, I retweet and share insights from people with fewer followers to expose their ideas to the people who follow me. Because ThinkUp alerts me to changes in people’s profiles and reminds me when people are being congratulated, I’ve found myself more plugged in to what people in my network are up to in their lives.

More basically, though, it’s helped me pull back from social networks. Each week, ThinkUp tells me how often I’ve tweeted. Sometimes that number is terribly high - a few weeks ago it was more than 800 times - and I realise I’m probably overtaxing my followers, so I pull back the next week.

But ThinkUp charges $5 (Rs 316) a month for each social network you connect to it. Is it worth it? After all, there’s a better, more surefire way of avoiding any such long-term catastrophe caused by social media: Just stop using social networks.

But even though “never tweet” became a popular, ironic thing to tweet this year, actually never tweeting, and never being on Facebook, is becoming nearly impossible for many people.

For starters, your online profile plays an important role in how you’re perceived by potential employers. In a recent survey commissioned by the job-hunting site CareerBuilder, almost half of companies said they perused job-seekers’ social-networking profiles to look for red flags and to see what sort of image prospective employees portrayed online.

Dash and Trapani argue that the future is increasingly social - that most jobs are going to become more connected, and that online image will become more important.