Reflections from the ‘Strava-sphere’: Kudos, community, and (self-)surveillance on a social network for athletes

ABSTRACT

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the practice of digital self-tracking. Researchers have drawn attention to who self-tracks, why people self-track, and what it feels like to self-track in the context of sport and physical activity. To date, limited research has focused on self-tracking as a social practice and there has been minimal engagement with the specific online platforms that individuals use to share their self-tracking data online. In this paper I engage with findings from an ethnographic study of Strava, a popular social fitness platform. I propose that while Strava can be a source of motivation and entertainment for its users, and even help to establish or strengthen social networks, the platform invites users to adopt and adapt to technologically-mediated surveillance strategies that encourage and reward displays of bodily self-discipline.

KEYWORDS:

• Strava
• self-tracking
• surveillance
• physical activity
• technology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szrsfeyLzyg

2. This is an interesting ‘full circle’, of sorts, if we consider that telephones have always been about facilitating communication.

3. Nearly 70% of American adults use Facebook, making it the most widely used of all social media platforms (Greenwood, Perrin, and Duggan 2016). Facebook use is reportedly on the decline, however, amongst younger users who are engaging more often with photo and video-centric platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, and Snapchat (Anderson and Jiang 2018).

4. In addition to those posts that are generated each time a Strava user uploads their physical activity data to the platform, users can also create text-based posts, similar to those found on other social networking platforms.

5. It could be argued that the question of agency is a slippery one if we consider that a user must have engaged in physical activity of some kind for it to be generated. It nevertheless seems there is a distinction to be made here.

6. Digital self-tracking data is increasingly promoted in the workplace and, in certain contexts, can influence personal insurance rates (see McFall 2019). Self-tracking data have also played key roles in lawsuits where ‘quantified self-incrimination’ has (dis)proven claims made in the courtroom (Crawford, Lingel, and Karpp 2015).

7. While not the focus of this paper, Strava Metro is a subsidiary of Strava that aggregates and de-identifies user-generated data and provides it to third parties such as departments of transportation and other city planning groups, ‘to improve infrastructure for bicyclists and pedestrians’ (Strava Metro 2020, n.p.).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [767-2017-2344].

Notes on contributors

Jesse Couture

Jesse Couture is a PhD candidate in the School of Kinesiology at the University of British Columbia.