Self-Tracking Among Recreational Athletes – Mediatization, Mobilization and Blurring Boundaries

• In Event: Sports Communication Scholarship on the Move: Building a New Research Agenda on Mobile Media and Technologies

Abstract

Mobile app-based self-tracking technologies like Strava, Endomondo and Runkeeper are stimulating socio-cultural changes in sports. These apps offer a distinct case for understanding how processes of mediatization relate to processes of mobilization and an increasing blurring of social and institutional boundaries through sporting and recreational practices. These software technologies are also important tools for communication and social interaction when integrated into the practices of a highly diversified group of recreational athletes. Understood as a component of wider mediatization processes, mobile media’s integration in these contexts demonstrates a distinct institutionalizing process because media are being used for ‘non-public use’. This implies that the affordances of self-tracking apps influence patterns of social interaction in sports, but that these media practices are also influenced by logics drawn from a range of other institutional contexts, including the family, work and health.

Author

• Kirsten Frandsen, Aarhus U