Brian Kanowsky

When I first signed up for Twitter, I created one account for playing around with the service and communicating with friends (@bmk – created 2008-01-10) and a second account for communicating with my colleagues at work (@bkanowsky – created 2008-07-21). After I left my job, I continued to use the “professional” @bkanowsky account to share news about technology, communication, and to a lesser extent, some personal updates. The @bmk account became my outlet for humorous and political expression.

And while I continued to encounter new people and conversations on my @bmk account, the @bkanowsky account quickly stagnated. I would sometimes go days without updating it, or provide only a perfunctory update. I wasn’t creating any value on the stream, and it showed – I never really grew the numbers of the people I followed or who followed me. I received very few replies or direct messages – too often, it was one-way communication.

At the same time, splitting my time and personality between two accounts held back my @bmk account. I don’t think I ever came across as a complete person, since I suppressed many of my other interests to focus on politics.

So, after 2 years, I’m declaring the split-personality experiment a failure. It doesn’t surprise me, since the very idea ignores the most basic advice about being successful with social media – the be yourself.

Over the next week, I’ll be winding down the @bkanowsky account. I’ll still be following many of the same people and making better use of Twitter lists to manage my account.

I’ll post a follow-up in 6 months and see how being my whole self affects my Twitter experience.

While browsing through my friends’ updates on Twitter, I was struck by the lack of a hashtag to aggregate all the smart and provocative content that Christian liberals were creating. After checking with a few influential Twitterers to make sure there wasn’t already a tag, I proposed the #pX hashtag.

(If you’re new to Twitter and need help figuring out what those hashtags are all about, check out this Mashable post.)

Why #pX?

I wanted to emulate other successful tags – they’re short, semantically memorable, and still meaningful. In this case, I wanted to play off the overlap with political progressives, who primarily use the #p2 hashtag. It stands for “Progressives 2.0”, and has an active userbase due to greater promotion and a shorter length. Other rival tags like #topprog and #rebelleft are still used by smaller communities on Twitter, but they lack the broad appeal of #p2.

So I set out to include the two basic aspects of this community – politically progressive and Christian. I started thinking about different representations and symbols that Christian groups have created for themselves over time, and came across the Wikipedia page for the Chi-Ro symbol – a P overlaid with an X, representing the first letters of “Christ” in Greek. This was one of the earliest christograms – that is, a combination of letters representing the name of Jesus Christ.

Chi-Ro symbol

The #XP tag was already in irregular use, mostly to refer to the aging Windows operating system. I was surprised when my searching revealed that #pX was available, so I quickly added the tag to popular hashtag repositories like What The Hashtag, Hashtag.org, and tagdef, among others.

Not only had I come across a hashtag that was symbolically meaningful, but it worked on a basic semantic level, too – using the traditional Greek letter Chi (X) to represent Christ (as in Xmas or any number of other common short names), pX is just a nice abbreviation for progressive Christian.

While capitalization technically isn’t recognized by Twitter or associated services, I used the traditional capitalization of the Lord’s name to show respect, and to reflect the relative importance of Christ to our political leanings.

Liberal Christians or Christian Liberals?

Like several of the other primary users of the #pX hashtag, I consider myself to be a Christian liberal rather than a liberal Christian. The difference, to me, is that my Christianity forms the basis for my political liberalism, informing and guiding it in a certain way. I don’t necessarily subscribe to liberal theology – something that doesn’t chart very easily on a typical left-right political scale anyway. And I wanted this hashtag to help create an open community of Christians who care deeply about peace, social justice, and a whole host of related issues.

#pX is about what we, as Christians living within a political system, can do with that political system to create a more just environment for all of God’s children. While theological issues will inevitably be discussed, the focus of the #pX community is on the political side of things – who has the power, how it is being used, and how it should be used.

You can join the conversation by adding #pX to your tweets. To follow the conversation, check the Twitter search page for #pX, or create in search in your favorite Twitter client.