Experiencing risk, surveillance, and prosumption: health and physical education students’ perceptions of digitised health and physical activity data

ABSTRACT

Digital technologies are now considered important in shaping young people's engagement in and with health and physical activity. Recent discussions show that the use of digital technologies to track health and fitness may over-emphasize the linear understanding of the body and health generally underpinned by Western health ideologies such as healthism. Other studies have shown the increased use of digital technologies in teaching Health and Physical Education (HPE) and as a means to enhance health and increase physical activity. Despite the opportunities and risks apparent in these studies, little is known about how HPE students make choices, negotiate, and resist or embrace the digitalisation of physical activity, exercise, and more broadly health. This study examines HPE students’ meaning making of risk and surveillance associated with the self-digitisation of exercise. The study further investigates how the concept of ‘prosumption’; the production, curation and consumption of self-data within the context of digitised health and physical activity, is understood. Based on the findings, we have constructed a typology of prosumers that can be used as a pedagogical device to illustrate the various kinds of subject positions students take up with digital technology in health and physical activity. This study extends the current understanding of prosumers by identifying the ‘ambivalent prosumer’. The results provide insights that have direct pedagogical implications in HPE teacher education specifically in the areas of knowledge production and consumption of knowledge through digital technology in health and physical activity.

KEYWORDS:

• Digital technologies
• prosumption
• surveillance
• health and physical activity
• health and physical education

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank Professor Tony Rossi for providing valuable and constructive feedback to improve the quality of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Sarah Cavillan http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2536-114X

Alexia Cupac http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0996-627X

Notes

1 Healthism (Crawford, 1980) is the preoccupation with individual's health as the focus of promoting health. It works by ‘persuading people that it is their individual responsibility to look after their health’ (Kirk & Colquhoun, 1989, p. 426, emphasis in the original). Healthism is dominant in shaping young peoples’ subjectivities and practices in relation to health and inadvertently promotes unhealthy body practices, as it reinforces the constructions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ bodies (Evans, Rich, & Holroyd, 2004; Rich, Holroyd, & Evans, 2004). In its discursive context, those who discipline themselves to become fit and healthy are positioned as the ‘norm’, whereas those who do not conform to these Western ideals of neoliberal rationalities of healthy citizenship are ‘othered’ and labelled as ‘bodies at risk’ (Burrows & Wright, 2004; Crawford, 1980; Gard & Wright, 2001).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Western Sydney University [School of Science and Health Catalysing Innovative].