How GPS sports watches keep ‘active lifestylers’ (im)mobile (original) (raw)

Abstract

Historically, recreational endurance running arose partially with the aim of controlling the side effects of a ‘seated’ life, i.e. obesity and physical inactivity. This trend developed already in the 19th century, with the emergence of middle classes who had the requisite time and resources. Recreational endurance running became very popular in the 1970s, within the context of renewed societal attention to fitness and physical health, which developed in the USA and spread quickly to other industrialized nations. Physical endurance activities such as long-distance running can be conceived of as technologies of the self, practices that can be used to transform oneself. However, they do not necessarily free an individual from the domination of disciplinary ideologies. Within the liberal project of self-development, people are required to take responsibility and to regulate their lives in a manner that confirms they are freely choosing individuals while, in fact, they act within clearly defined fields of possibilities. Their ‘choices’ are pertinent to and normalized within the dominant (neoliberal) discourses with which they engage. In this context, endurance runners are model individuals in contemporary society: dedicated, controlled, disciplined, culturally and economically invested in health and self-responsible. Based on exploratory ethnographic research, I discuss in this paper the crucial role that mobile tracking devices, as markers of an active lifestyle, play in this process. I focus on how the data generated by GPS sports watches are widely shared by runners and their followers on general as well as specialized social media platforms. I disentangle why, paradoxically, these technologies seem to make exemplary mobile people more immobile, because many hours are spent sitting behind electronic device screens to communicate (and seeking social approval for) the mobile performances. I place my critical anthropological analysis within the context of wider societal trends related to self-discipline and self-control.

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