https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9790-1865
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ABSTRACT
Self-tracking is increasingly popular in recreational sport. Leisure sports practitioners use wearable devices that are connected to online platforms to record, analyse, and share their exercise data. While doing that they interact with a digital system, with themselves, and with peers. This paper examines social-communicative aspects of self-tracking, and the support that these aspects and their associated practices may provide for physical activity behaviour. Data for the study was collected using an online survey and in-depth interviews with Finnish trail runners. The results indicate that sharing exercise data with others on a regular basis can support physical activity behaviour because it is mediated by social peer support. The analysis identified information sharing, comparison, and recognition as the main social-communicative aspects that motivate sharing physical activity data online, and ordinariness and privacy as reasons that limit data sharing. This paper contributes to the discussion on digital leisure by showing that for many users, communal and self-motivational values of self-tracking practices surpass the concern of surveillance and commodification of leisure time.
Acknowledgments
The author wishes to thank Mikko Villi, Juha Herkman, and Janne Matikainen for their expertise and assistance in all aspects of this study and for commenting the manuscript. The author would also like to thank the reviewers for their insightful comments for improving this paper.
Disclosure statement
The author reports no conflict of interest.
Notes
3. For example, Movescount (http://www.movescount.com/) encourages users to ‘share your best Moves with your friends in Movescount and beyond’, whereas Strava business (https://business.strava.com/) asserts that ‘brands on Strava connect with athletes like nowhere else.’ Retrieved 1 April 2020.
4. Rainie and Wellman (Citation2012) describe networked individualism as the ‘new social operating system’ that is rooted in what they call ‘the triple revolution’. By that they mean the sequential revolution of social networks, the internet, and mobile media. In leisure context, networked individualism means that people move from organised recreational groups to shifting networks of recreational friends (Rainie & Wellman, Citation2012).
5. Light sport communities comprise of self-organised informal sport groups. In contrast to heavy sport organisations (such as traditional sport clubs) that value rules and commitment, light sport communities are flexible in their nature (Borgers et al., Citation2018).
6. Media logic means that each media has their own set of steering logics that impact and direct the activities of other societal institutions and that are ‘both influenced by the media themselves and by the institutional logics in the area concerned (e.g., politics or sport)’ (Hjarvard, Citation2018, p. 66).
9. Question format: to what extent does variable x motivate you to practice trail running? Scale: not at all, to a little extent, to a moderate extent, to a great extent, to a very great extent.
10. Question 1: to what extent do your social contacts motivate you to practice trail running? Scale: not at all, to a little extent, to a moderate extent, to a great extent, to a very great extent. Question 2: my sport-related social contacts motivate me to practice trail running. Scale: strongly disagree, disagree, neither agree nor disagree, agree, strongly agree.
11. In the survey, sharing was not limited to any specific self-tracking device or platform or any other communication channel. Also with whom one shares exercise data was not defined meaning both public and private sharing were included.
14. To protect participants’ privacy, pseudonyms are used.
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Veera Ehrlén
Veera Ehrlén is a doctoral student in the Department of Language and Communication Studies at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Her research focuses on new media, digital culture, and network-based communication in the context of leisure-time activities.