Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the contemporary digital mobilization of the Meyers-Briggs Personality Scale in North America and Southeast Asia. Though not well supported scientifically, the test provides a compelling frame for self-narration in digitally mediated systems that value emotional classificability.

Paper long abstract:

Testable, scalable forms of digitally mediated subjectivity have proliferated in the era of social media. One of the most prevalent is the popular culture of online testing that has developed and spread since the World Wide Web's inception. In the late 1990s, websites adapted extant vernacular testing traditions such as that of the "Purity Test," with sites such as Buzzfeed and Upworthy continuing routinely run similar simple tests and questionnaires.

This paper explores the global dimensions of the Meyers-Briggs Type Indicator personality test, a psychological rating scale that underpins much of the vernacular culture of online testing today. Grounded in Jungian typological theory, the test's popularity belies the fact that neither Meyers nor Briggs were initially trained in personality or psychometric testing. The test is not only increasingly popular online, but is also widely used in workplace training and assessment.

The Meyers-Briggs test is mobilized as a convenient shorthand descriptor of personality, both on social media platforms and in offline social settings. This paper will compare the use of the Meyers-Briggs in two different global social media settings - the United States and Southeast Asia - by examining the test's mobilization on social media platforms, discussion forums, and in literature aimed at young workers. In doing so, the paper argues that this particular digitized and popularized psychological test has a homogenizing effect in its global context, and that the test's chief impact is to shape neoliberal, reflexive and categorizable forms of subjective expression online.