Sport in an individualized and digitalized society: more important than ever?

Although current global problems, such as the refugee crises, climate change, and overpopulation, make it more important than ever for governments to work together, politics have shown an increasing trend towards protectionism, particularism, and isolation.

This tendency towards ‘particularistic world views’ at the macro level has its correspondence at the micro level of modern society. It is an elementary characteristic of individualization that ‘people’s decisions and preferences are based primarily on the realization of personal interests’ (Halman, 1996, 195). Modern society not only provides the individual with manifold opportunities but also causes a rigorous competition for scarce resources. The individual biography has therefore become a risky do-it-yourself biography, which is shaped by a ‘state of permanent endangerment’ (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim, 2001, 3). In this context, the individual has to see him/herself ‘as a planning office with regard to [his/her] own life course, talents, preferences, partnerships, etc.’ (trnsl. from Beck, 1986, 217).

Particularly, levels of qualification and proficiency have become determinants of the life career. As a consequence, individualization has fundamentally shaped education programmes for kindergartens and schools over the last decades. In order to offer children and adolescents the best possible start in life, the design of learning environments has increasingly focused on a methodically and didactically professionalized promotion of individual strengths and self-development (Thiel, 1996). A central element of these programmes is to enable the individual to recognize and verbalize his/her own talents, needs, and feelings. On the downside, performance pressure that already starts in early childhood (for example with foreign language classes for three-month-old babies) does not allow for a ‘We-awareness’ but rather promotes a sense of great individuality (Valentin, 2012, 9–11). Although social norms and values of a reciprocal community, such as mutual respect, politeness, humility, and obedience, still appear to be important to the way European middle-class families raise their children, they tend to play a subordinate role (Valentin, 2012).

Processes of individualization also impact the way a child’s social sphere is organized. Since 1990s, it has been observed that children’s lifeworlds are increasingly becoming more specialized and isolated. ‘Helicopter parents’ are hovering over their children, eagerly trying to support them wherever they can in order to solve their problems and promote their success (Kelly, Duran, & Miller-Ott, 2017; Odenweller, Booth-Butterfield, & Weber, 2014). They drive their children from one ‘island’, such as school, sports club, music school, or friends, to the next and, therefore, take control over their lifestyles as well as their everyday and leisure-time mobility. Consequently, they do not allow them to autonomously explore the social spaces in between and leave little room for free play (Zeiher, 1990). In fact, children’s games become more and more functionalized. To promote children’s development in the best possible way, they take place at a fixed location, are instructed by professionals and serve a predetermined purpose (Zeiher, 1994).

In the future, technological progress appears to lead to an even stronger focus on the individual. In the education sector, for example, it is expected that already in 20 years an automated personalization of education will be possible. In what experts call ‘new classrooms’, individualized and digitally implemented learning units in the form of massive open online courses (MOOC) will be taught by educational computers which are capable of identifying learning patterns on the basis of big data knowledge. As a result, teaching and training will become precisely tailored to the learner’s level of knowledge, strengths, and weaknesses (Breithaupt, 2016; Cooper & Sahami, 2013; Dräger & Müller-Eiselt, 2015).

Intensified by digitalization, individualization also changes everyday communication. Modern communication media with access to the internet have become a natural part of everyday life. Recent research even indicates that people sometimes experience smartphones as a part of their own body (Liepelt, Dolk, & Hommel, 2017). According to figures from 2014, 94% of German 10- to 11-year-olds are online 22 minutes per day. In this regard, instant messaging (e.g. WhatsApp, iMessage, or Hangout) has become much more important for the communication with peers than phone calls (Holdampf-Wendel, Shahd, & Hampe, 2014). The ability to communicate almost independently of time of day and location provides the opportunity to create virtual ‘meeting places’ (Tillmann & Hugger, 2014) and offers participation and inclusion in an otherwise fragmented lifeworld.

Digitalization also impacts social relationships. Apps like WhatsApp or Snapchat relieve the individual from the obligation to instantly respond to a message. Furthermore, the need for ‘reading’ facial expressions and nonverbal gestures has become less relevant. Instead, emotions are expressed by emoticons and emojis which are supposed to be less ambiguous. Digital social negotiation processes aim to reduce complexity. At the same time, the tone of comments and posts, which have become ubiquitously present online, seems only to be loosely determined by informal rules of politeness. Social recognition is primarily communicated through ‘likes’. Eventually, ‘everything gets mediated’ (Hepp, Hjarvard, & Lundby, 2010, 224) and the number of ‘clicks’ indicates what is popular and what is not.

Thus, people do not communicate less in a digitalized society. However, the way in which people communicate makes social negotiation processes within communication less important. The social restrictions of digitalized everyday communication may lead to deficits in adolescents’ development of social skills. Accordingly, Konrath et al. (2011) found that individualization processes have already led to a drastic decline of 48% in college students’ empathic concerns between 1979 and 2009.

Sport may provide a compensatory setting for dealing with the consequences of individualization and digitalization, such as the decline of social skills in adolescents. Sport settings offer a great opportunity for children and teenagers to develop, train, and reflect on social skills. This is specifically the case in sports disciplines that require participants to work together and communicate despite a competitive relationship.

Sport sociology can operate as a ‘barometer’ to display the implications and consequences of modernization processes. Moreover, it can provide knowledge about which settings are suitable to what extent in order to contribute to the development of social skills. Given the increasing trends of individualization within the European society, there will be enough issues for sport sociological research to focus during the coming years.

Notes on contributors

Ansgar Thiel is the Director of the Institute of Sports Science at the Eberhard Karls University Tuebingen and a professor of sport sociology. In his current research, he focuses on activity- and health-related biographies, social determinants and biopsychosocial effects of physical activity, body-related stigmatization and health, social aspects of health in elite sports, and modernization processes in the context of sport.

Hannes Gropper is a PhD student at the Institute of Sports Science in Tuebingen. He has a degree in teaching (German state exam) Sports and English from the Eberhard Karls University Tuebingen. His research interests are modernization processes and its implications for youth elite sports and health- and activity-related biographies.

Disclosure statement

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of this article.