Strike Mission! Fluid Assemblages of Mobile Media, Masculinity and Surfing

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

Abstract

The relationship between surfers and mobile media is mutually-shaping. It is changing the surfing lifestyle and experiences, both in the small institutionalized setting of professional surfing competitions and the far more widespread “serious leisure” setting. For example, a “surfer’s sense” now emerges through mobile media. This process involves the agencies of humans, smartphones, wave buoys, algorithms, social media, action cameras, and more. This paper explains these assemblages through a digital ethnography of a surfing “strike mission”. These missions are how a “connected crew” get to surfing locations with military-like precision when they sense a place will “turn on”, as well as share and police the resulting feelings. The paper explores the question: how do more-than-human sporting assemblages involving mobile media produce and reproduce particular masculinized voices – human and technological?

Author

• Clifton Evers, University of Newcastle