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Let’s start with you. Who are you, and what lens do you bring to understanding people online?
Something important about me is that my favourite Community episode is “Remedial Chaos Theory”. I have also been incredibly lucky for fields to develop just in time to fit my interests academically and professionally. I’ve graduated with a Master’s degree in Behavioural Economics which gave my fascination with decision making some structure and straight after graduation I got a job as a media analyst, which made me transition from a casual social media scroller to a social intelligence expert. The first time I was shown a boolean powered media monitoring platform my mind was blown. I’d spent a lot of time in my youth participating in niche communities online, mostly around gaming and esports, but I had no idea there was an actual profession to be had analysing such content, with a real and growing tech stack available to enable it.
I believe the internet is just another space for people to hang out, so our goal is to understand people first. It’s fashionable to track the ephemeral changing man, but more than a century of traditional media and a bit over two decades of some form of modern social media have left us with a wealth of data allowing us to see the unchanging man, who is the foundation we need to be building our understanding of people on.
What’s a working theory you have right now about how people behave online?
As someone with a background in behavioural economics I’ve felt for a while we were never meant to consume so much unverified information in so little time and this is leading us to an increasing number of peculiar outcomes in how we behave. The information gap online is real and people’s capacity to validate each small piece of information that gets thrown our way is a finite source. I think the moderation challenges some major social media platforms are facing, paired with the AI slop flood on our feeds, mean people are increasingly looking for authenticity and safe havens where they can connect without all the noise. It’s a very peculiar time to be online, as we now have more digital spaces than ever to hang out, but the spaces we trust and feel safe and confident in have dwindled. This has been a natural continuation of the nostalgia focused trends which took over our media feeds over the past decade, as people have already been yearning for simpler times and in 2026 simpler times seems to mean early internet with your buddies on that one forum.
What’s an insight you surfaced that you still think about? What one stuck with you?
It’s the insights you’d easily miss if you don’t question your research approach or your understanding of the category/market/consumers. I’ve done a few pieces of research looking into fandoms, particularly how they behave when their favourite piece of media gets adapted into a different format. These are potentially your strongest advocates or most vicious detractors depending on how you treat them. They also tend to break down into echo chambers which are extreme in their opinions, so when it comes to measuring public response to your adaptation, it’s important to identify the spaces they’ve chosen and separate them from the casual viewer to weigh their opinions appropriately. Their opinions are important, but you do not want them to skew your findings, you need to utilise them as the valuable benchmark that they are. This of course warrants some deeper understanding of your category, so it serves as a reminder that we need to be wary of tunnel vision when planning our research, so we don’t miss the nuanced story. That’s why I advocate to give your social intelligence team/partners time. You’ll get the good stuff if you let them immerse themselves in the topic and the best bet to do that is some old fashioned unstructrured scrolling through some feeds.
What’s the weirdest rabbit hole your work has ever sent you down? And what did it teach you?
This might not sound like an exciting topic, but exploring the way UK household energy pricing is set up had me reeling. All the different consumption plans, time of use tariffs and the like. The lesson I got out of it all was that the more complex your system is, the less people trust it. There is real danger in overdesigning systems, even if the intent is a positive one. Disinformation narratives really thrive in the information murkiness and I honestly do not envy the comms professionals who have to fight on that battlefield.
What skills or mindsets do you think the next generation of analysts will need?
My concern for current and future analysts is falling into the trap of the automation bias. We’d already seen this with advanced social listening platforms where vanity quantitative data became a low hanging fruit leading analysts to disregard qualitative insights. It’s still important to stay curious and resist the urge to just fill in slides in a deck. Another important skill to hone is media literacy. To verify the information and to understand its context, but also to know where to look. If you need to do a consumer journey, not all sources are made equal. Longer form user conversation is likely to be a better spot to drill than others. A good researcher has to be naturally curious, but also skeptical. The scientific method should be your guide and your story must be falsifiable. Analysts need to stick to the basics - try to find out, verify claims, and be a reader, not just a writer. Your research is not just a few slides, it’s the result of reading through thousands of words and hundreds of stories you’ve heard/seen before in your work or personal life. I read this somewhere and it sums it up well: Part of the research is the research itself, not just the output, as you research a topic, allowing you to come to a conclusion.
Don’t give the copilot the wheel.
What’s a niche community, account, or corner of the internet you’re watching right now? And why?
I just keep coming back to eReaders. Shout out to the mobileread.com forum which goes back to at least 2006. Reddit is of course another primary hangout spot with multiple brand and category related vibrant communities. The latest development that dragged me back into the topic was a large company updating their encryption in early 2025 to combat book piracy. For a corner of the internet the act of removing this encryption meant you actually own your book and the company couldn’t just delete it from your reader (something that had happened before). And this is where the clash happened. This company’s brand was essentially a synonym for e-reader. This is still the case, but you can now observe a noticeable crack. People started flooding relevant Reddit spaces and asking about alternative brands, with more open systems, as well as potential strategies to transfer your libraries. As these devices more or less share the same essential hardware (there is a single company producing e-ink displays) the space to differentiate yourself to the consumer has been very slim and it’s been curious to witness events that manage to shake it up and the aftermath moving forward. This event is also a signal that more people are becoming aware that the ownership of digital goods might not be set up the way they thought it was.
Last non-work thing you read that shaped your thinking?
I struggle to point to the last thing as often things shape our thinking without us immediately noticing. Fiction has broadly shaped and keeps shaping my thinking daily though, and while reading this question one quote popped in my mind, so I will share it:
“Never make your home in a place. Make a home for yourself inside your own head. You'll find what you need to furnish it--memory, friends you can trust, love of learning, and other such things. That way it will go with you wherever you journey. You'll never lack for a home--unless you lose your head, of course...” ― Tad Williams, The Dragonbone Chair
I’ve been following this advice furnishing my home as best as I can and it has made the journey better for it.
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