Broadcast Yourself: An Exploratory Study of Sharing Physical Activity on Social Networking Sites

Abstract

This article focuses on the practice of self-tracking of physical activity data and sharing it via social networking sites. The use of wearable technology devices and the latest smartphones with built-in GPS tracking technology – capturing the speed, distance and duration of physical activities such as running and cycling – is a striking example of the trend towards quantifying sports performances. The study explores the determinants and motivations of recreational athletes to share physical activity status updates on the social networking sites Facebook and Twitter. Evidence is drawn from a large-scale survey of 400 users of Strava, a popular fitness app and online community. The results suggest that intrinsic rather than extrinsic motivations determine a person's willingness to share physical activity via social networking sites.

From panopticon to heautopticon: A new form of surveillance introduced by quantified‐self practices

“…Furthermore, we observe the emergence of lateral surveillance, “not the top‐down monitoring of employees by employers, citizens by the state, but rather the peer‐to‐peer surveillance of spouses, friends, and relatives” (Andrejevic, , p. 481), which is also manifest with the omniopticon (Mitrou et al ()). Prior research has pointed out the online communities' role in the practice of QS that provides moral support (Barta & Neff, ; Stragier, Evens, & Mechant, ). Similarly, our results indicate that friends and online communities can motivate and encourage users, as well as support lateral surveillance, leading some users to change their trackers' parameters to the private mode in order to prevent other users from seeing their performances.…”

How does health feel? Towards research on the affective atmospheres of digital health

“…The athletic platform and app Strava, for example, has an overt focus on promoting ‘social fitness’, involving members exchanging their data and providing support and motivation to each other by commenting on each other’s data. 81 It also provides a function for members involving uploading images of their cycling trips or runs, so that they can show other members where they have travelled. 65 , 82 Several other self-tracking apps encourage users to upload their data to social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter.…”

Changing emotional engagement with running through communal self‐tracking: the implications of ‘teleoaffective shaping’ for public health

“…Sharing and communicating on Strava is part of an overt ‘social fitness’ approach (Lupton , Stragier et al . ) and a key feature of the latest communal self‐tracking ‘boom’ in self‐tracking consumption (Millington ) that moves beyond the personal to the ‘communal’ (Lupton ). Existing research into communal self‐tracking finds strong evidence for the influence of social interaction on sustaining or changing behaviour (Benetoli et al .…”