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.

摘要

自我跟踪在休闲运动中越来越受欢迎。休闲运动从业者使用连接到在线平台的可穿戴设备来记录、分析和共享他们的运动数据。在这样做的同时，他们与数字系统、他们自己以及同龄人进行互动。本文研究了自我跟踪的社会交流方面，以及这些方面及其相关实践可能为身体活动行为提供的支持。该研究的数据是通过在线调查和对芬兰越野跑者的深入采访收集的。结果表明，定期与他人共享锻炼数据可以支持身体活动行为，因为它是由社会同伴支持介导的。分析确定了信息共享、比较、和认可是激发在线共享身体活动数据的主要社会交流方面，而平凡和隐私是限制数据共享的原因。本文通过表明对于许多用户而言，自我跟踪实践的公共和自我激励价值超越了对休闲时间的监视和商品化的关注，从而促进了对数字休闲的讨论。