ABSTRACT

Amid technological convergence and the proliferation of new digital distribution methods, at-home fitness devices and fitness media have entered the cultural mainstream. However, fitness media companies like Peloton, Mirror, and Tonal, as quasi-television producers and distributors, have yet to be contextualized within critical media and cultural studies. Leveraging press coverage, interface and hardware analysis, and marketing paratexts, this paper turns to television’s cultural and economic history to consider the continuities and changes concerning visual media’s place within the domestic sphere and the economic conditions that have led fitness companies to venture into media production. Ultimately, this research concludes that home fitness technologies and their associated marketing work through long-held cultural anxieties regarding surveillance and technology with the home. This paper also updates critical theory to argue that these new media devices have oriented users as information-age consumers of digital products and have obfuscated data surveillance by anthropomorphizing digital spaces and making such products seem immaterial and innocuous.

摘要

随着技术的融合和新的数字传播方式的扩散，家庭健身设备和健身媒体已进入文化主流。然而，像 Peloton、Mirror 和 Tonal 这样的健身媒体公司，作为准电视制作人和发行商，还没有被纳入批判性媒体和文化研究的背景。利用新闻报道、界面和硬件分析以及营销副文本，本文转向电视的文化和经济史，以考虑视觉媒体在国内领域的地位的连续性和变化以及导致健身公司涉足媒体制作的经济条件. 最终，这项研究得出的结论是，家庭健身技术及其相关营销通过长期存在的对家庭监控和技术的文化焦虑而发挥作用。本文还更新了批判理论，认为这些新媒体设备将用户定位为数字产品的信息时代消费者，并通过将数字空间拟人化并使此类产品看起来无关紧要和无害，从而混淆了数据监控。