Fit for Prosumption: Interactivity and the Second Fitness Boom
This paper advances the claim that we are in the midst of a second ‘fitness boom’, one marked
by the integration of customizable, interactive, and in many cases mobile technologies into
fitness pursuits. Fitness as a result is undergoing profound changes in how it is perceived and
experienced.
The first fitness boom arose in the late 1970s and 1980s. It was characterized in large part
by the proliferation of fitness ‘tools’: apparel from companies like Nike and Reebok; equipment
such as treadmills for use in the home; and fitness media like the popular exercise videos
featuring the actress Jane Fonda. Fitness, moreover, was imagined at this time as a moral
responsibility. Accordingly, it served an ideological purpose at the intersections of consumer
culture and the emerging neoliberal governmental rationality.
The new fitness boom does not constitute a break from these foregoing trends; rather, it
extends and intensifies what came before it. Specifically, a case is made herein that, with the
proliferation of commercial technologies for measuring the body and monitoring fitness activity,
the second fitness boom comprises the following characteristics: 1) socio-technical networks in
which humans and non-humans are thoroughly entangled; 2) an emphasis on human-technology
interactivity; 3) data-intensiveness, and particularly the production of ‘small data’ in large
quantities; 4) the customization of fitness measures/activities in the interest of ‘optimization’; 5)
the option for individual users to partake in wider online communities; and finally, 6) both ‘new’
and ‘old’ forms of commodification.
Having first historicized the new fitness boom through a review of fitness interventions of
past eras, the paper’s main section assesses the above characteristics in detail. The final part of
the analysis situates the second fitness boom in relation to wider trends in media culture. A case
is made at this time that fitness, more so than ever before, is now a matter of prosumption – and
most significantly automated prosumption whereby data can be generated with limited effort
from fitness participants themselves. As companies such as Nintendo, Google, Apple, and
Microsoft join the fitness realm, fitness is indeed a key consideration for those studying media,
culture, and society.
The Fitness Boom
‘Fitness’ as a concept evades easy definition. It is commonly associated with strength, flexibility,
and cardiovascular endurance, though Jennifer Smith Maguire (2008) notes that lived definitions
include feelings of capacity and control, as well as perceptions of social norms and expectations.
The fitness boom that arose in the late 1970s was not without antecedents. In the inter-war years,
for example, Charles Atlas became an icon of physical culture and a salesman for his ‘DynamicTension’ exercise program. Even so, the first fitness boom was historically remarkable.
At the center of the fitness boom were fitness participants themselves: physical activity
was taken up in large numbers by once-sedentary individuals (see King, 2006). Yet the first
fitness boom was also significant in that it saw the proliferation of fitness-themed media of many
kinds. Smith Maguire (2008) notes that features on ‘physical fitness’ in magazines and
newspapers grew substantially across the 1980s, and continued on this same trajectory in the
decade that followed. Advice in these types of publications was tailored for men and women
both. A 1986 issue of Shape magazine, for example, announced that ‘Strong is Sexy’ for women
– a caption accompanied by ‘a photo of a slightly muscled young bathing-suited woman wielding
a seductive smile and a not too heavy dumbbell’ (Messner, 1988: 204). Fitness manuals and
videos advanced similar ideas. Jane Fonda’s Workout Book from 1981, for example, was a New
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York Times best seller for two years; the actress’ workout videos achieved global success. More
to the point, texts of this kind depicted the fit body as a proxy for empowerment (Mansfield,
2011; also see MacNeill, 1998). The story was much the same for men, though magazines like
Flex, in the tradition of Charles Atlas, imagined muscularity and masculinity as interchangeable
constructs (White and Gillett, 1994).
Fitness apparel and exercise equipment were central to the first fitness boom as well.
Apparel makers such as Nike and Reebok provided shoes, shorts, and shirts to fuel fitness
participation, while exercise equipment was made more sophisticated and was marketed for use
in domestic setting. As James Hay (2003) writes in reference to technologies such as exercise
bikes and treadmills: ‘Home fitness technology routinely became equipped with audio and visual
meters for monitoring movements of the body over a visual terrain – a stationary mobility’ (p.
175). Health clubs and fitness gyms grew more prominent at this time too, as these were spaces
to engage with fitness professionals such as aerobics instructors and personal trainers (Smith
Maguire, 2008).
Beyond its material dimensions, the fitness boom was also significant in its ideological
dimensions. Robert Crawford’s (1980; 2006) conception of ‘the new health consciousness’, or
‘healthism’, is relevant in this regard. If neoliberalism rests in part on the promotion of
‘privatized, market solutions to public problems’ (p. 409), the proliferation of fitness
commodities for the self-interested and responsible consumer was indeed a fitting development
with the ‘problem’ of health in mind. Writes Crawford (2006) of the period from roughly 1975 to
1985: ‘The new health consciousness became a model of and a model for what individual
responsibility or its putative absence would differentially bestow and thus served as an embodied
replication of individual responsibility for economic well-being’ (p. 409). Samantha King’s
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(2006) observation that the body was a bellwether of ‘fit living’ is relevant here as well: ‘in the
1980s the fit body became at once a status symbol and an emblem of an individual’s purchasing
power, moral health, self-control, and personal discipline’ (p. 48). All told, fitness – legible on
the body – was part of a wider transition in how health was understood. Health in turn helped
establish the ‘common sense’ of neoliberalism.
The Second Fitness Boom
The second fitness boom logically extends the preceding boom in many ways, though it does so
in pronounced fashion. That this is an important time in the history of commercialized fitness
provision can first be witnessed in the mere proliferation of sophisticated interactive fitness
hardware and software. Among the most prominent products of this kind are the following:

Fitness-themed video games, of which Nintendo’s Wii Fit series of games has been most
successful. The Wii console itself was made in part with the aim of reversing the
perception that gaming is a necessarily unhealthy activity (Millington, 2014a). Wii Fit and
its successor games, Wii Fit Plus and Wii Fit U, all work in conjunction with Nintendo’s
motion-capturing ‘Balance Board’ – a rectangular platform that lays supine on the floor –
so as to offer both bodily assessment activities and ‘virtual’ forms of fitness participation.

Wearable fitness tracking devices – and especially wristbands – that operate on the premise
that the body can be constantly monitored. The ‘slim and stylish’ Flex™ Wireless Activity
& Sleep Wristband, part of the company Fitbit’s suite of tracking technologies, is indeed a
device made to accompany the user day and night (Fitbit Inc., 2014a). The Jawbone UP®
Activity Tracker, a rival product, similarly has ‘advanced sensors’ for tracking sleep and
movement activity (Jawbone, 2015).

‘Smart garments’, meaning clothing already embedded with sensor technology. The
marketplace in this case is evidently growing more saturated as well, with Athos,
Sensoria®, OMsignal, and Hexoskin all standing as example brands. OMsignal’s
‘Biometric Smartwear’, for instance, is where ‘Apparel meets tech’; its automated
garments feel ‘like a second skin’ (OMsignal, 2014). For its part, the Sensoria® line of
products includes T-shirts, sports bras and socks – all infused with textile sensors for
tracking movement over time and across space (Heapsylon LLC, 2014).
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
Finally, health and fitness application software, the use of which grew by 62% in the first
half of 2014 (measured in sessions), compared to 33% for mobile apps in general –
‘stunning’ growth in the assessment of the mobile analytics company Flurry (see Khalaf,
2014). In one sense, apps are inseparable from many of the above-described products in
that they provide software for relaying fitness data to consumers. Sensoria® socks transfer
biometric data to the Sensoria® app, ‘allowing you to track the effectiveness of your
workout, literally one step at a time’ (Heapsylon LLC, 2014). In another sense, apps can be
made as standalone products too, tracking measures like calories consumed and expended
without the help of any extra wearable devices.
To be sure, with respect to these last products, apps in the ‘health and fitness’ category in
app stores at times operate more as e-medicine devices than fitness tools (e.g., apps for insulin
monitoring). That said, there are also separate ‘Medicine’ and ‘Medical’ categories in the app
stores hosted by Apple and Google, respectively, and many of the most prominent health and
fitness apps function in similar fashion to the wearable fitness technologies described above.
Of course, ‘old’ media lingers still. Fitness magazines like Shape remain prominent.
Fitness gyms are still populated with customers and personal trainers. The point, in one sense, is
that the interactive technologies listed above have further saturated the fitness marketplace. The
second fitness boom features a wide array of commercial players, from small-scale developers to
fitness stalwarts like Nike to technology companies such as Google, Apple, and Microsoft. In
many cases, new fitness technologies have made for lucrative ventures. As of March 2014,
Nintendo had sold more than 22 million copies of Wii Fit and more than 21 million Wii Fit Plus
games worldwide (Nintendo, 2014). MyFitnessPal, with over 80 million users signed up for its
website and app, was recently sold to the apparel company Under Armour for $475 million USD
(Olson, 2015). This is a fitness boom in that, for many, business is booming.
In another sense, though, the devices noted above are important in that they are empirically
re-shaping what fitness involves and conceptually altering what fitness means. The claim that we
are in the midst of a new fitness boom pertains more to the changing fitness landscape in
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empirical and conceptual terms than it does a spike in fitness industry revenue. Hence, there is a
need to map characteristics of the new fitness boom, as the following section aims to do.
Characteristics of the Second Fitness Boom
1) The second fitness boom is socio-technical
The supposition that the second fitness boom is comprised of socio-technical networks follows
from Bruno Latour’s insights on the necessary integration of people and ‘things’ (see especially
Latour, 1993). Action, for Latour, is not reducible to human intentions: ‘Action is not done under
the full control of consciousness; action should rather be felt as a node, a knot, and a
conglomerate of many surprising sets of agencies that have to be slowly disentangled’ (Latour,
2005: 44). Latour thus positions non-humans as agents, much as humans are generally accepted
to be (hence, ‘agencies’ in the plural). They can indeed act as ‘intermediaries’, transporting
meaning or force without transforming it. But they may also serve as active mediators:
‘Mediators transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning or the elements they are
supposed to carry’ (Latour, 2005: 39).
Adopting this position, fitness has always comprised socio-technical networks. Yet in one
sense, the integration of people and things is simply more obvious in this new era of fitness:
humans and non-humans are literally connecting to one another. OMsignal biometric apparel, as
noted above, is said to feel ‘like a second, super soft skin’ (OMsignal, 2015). One might have
said this in the past of a simple cotton shirt, but a simple cotton shirt would not be designed to
automatically record biometric data and stream it from one’s body to one’s phone. Likewise,
with its motion-capturing remote controller, the Nintendo Wii console was imagined by
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developers as an extension of the gamer’s body (Millington, 2009) – a claim that resonates with
the view of technologies as prosthetic addenda (Cranny-Francis, 2008).
In another sense, the new fitness boom is socio-technical in that it introduces a wide array
of actants to the fitness landscape – humans and non-humans whose contributions to fitness
activity are only evident upon inspection. Fitbit, as said above, for example, offers a suite of
products designed to make daily living knowable in quantified form – wristbands, a ‘smart
scale’, and attachable activity and sleep trackers, among other devices. A Fitbit blog post from
2009 on the company’s website describes Fitbit’s use of accelerometer technology in data
collection: “[Fitbit’s] accelerometer constantly measures the acceleration of your body and
algorithms convert this raw data into useful information about your daily life, such as calories
burned, steps, distance and sleep quality” (Fitbit, 2014b). Disentangling this further, algorithms
themselves need be carefully devised in the interest of accuracy. And so Fitbit has enlisted
(human) ‘test subjects’ in production, having them wear both the Fitbit and (non-human) ‘truth
devices’ – the latter providing sophisticated measures of gas composition in one’s breath, as one
example, but presumably unmarketable in and of themselves due to their elaborate appearance.
‘By wearing this type of device and the Fitbit at the same time, equations/algorithms can be
developed that attempt to accurately convert the raw data collected by the Fitbit into the calorie
numbers reported by the “truth” device’ (Fitbit, 2014b).
Ben Williamson (2015) observes that, in order for tracking technologies to function,
‘certain expert understandings and classifications of the body and of healthiness, derived from
various sciences, have to be accommodated through being mathematically encoded in
physiological models and algorithmic systems’ (p. 141). The interface of Fitbit and flesh that
manifests in consumption is indeed underpinned by human and non-human actants both: truth
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devices, sport scientists, algorithms, and surely many more. This is not unlike how Nintendo Wii
developers integrated sensor technologies into the Wii console in production to subsequently
allow an array of interactive functionalities (Millington, 2009). New fitness technologies are in
the first instance ‘conglomerates’ of these (perhaps surprising) sets of agencies.
2) The second fitness boom is interactive
As implied in Fitbit’s efforts at delivering ‘useful information about your daily life’, production
in the new fitness boom is commonly geared towards delivering interactive fitness experiences.
The view that interactivity is both a quality of the media consumer – ‘it resides in the minds of
media users as perceptions’ (Kiousis, 2002: 371) – and a quality of media itself is instructive.
This militates against presumptions of passivity among media ‘audiences’. As Louise Mansfield
(2011) recounts, even those engaging with Jane Fonda’s fitness books were implored to take up a
productive disposition.
Even so, interactivity in the new fitness boom is novel in contrast to preceding eras in its
intensified reciprocity: technologies respond to the consumer, and vice versa, often in real time.
On one side of this relationship, consumers are asked first to conspire with technologies in
producing fitness data. At times this requires conscious effort; for example, the app Lose It! asks
users to input dietary information so as to archive their caloric intake (FitNow, Inc., 2015). In
keeping with our contemporary ‘sensor society’ (Andrejevic and Burdon, 2015), however, the
task of producing data is commonly automated as well. For example, one of the ostensible merits
of Misfit’s attachable motion tracking device, Shine, is said to be how effortlessly it can be put to
use. Having set an activity goal – say, 8000 steps – users then need only affix the stylish Shine to
their bodies or clothing. A tap on the device shows one’s progress towards the pre-determined
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objective (Misfit Wearables, n.d.). In such cases, interactivity is ‘passive-ized’, at least from the
user’s perspective (Andrejevic and Burdon, 2015). People generate data – they prosume, as
discussed in the paper’s final section – but leave the ‘heavy lifting’ of compiling it to non-human
devices.
On the other side of this relationship, having first registered data on human performance,
fitness technologies are furthermore tasked with relaying fitness data back to consumers in
digestible form, whether through charts, graphs, auditory cues, or other mechanisms of this kind.
Fitness merchants at times go so far as to proclaim that, in taking on such responsibility, fitness
technologies are de facto human experts. In Latour’s (1999) terms, non-humans are delegated
responsibility as, for example, coaches and trainers. The Sensoria® Fitness app, working in
combination with Sensoria® Fitness garments, is sold to consumers as a ‘personal running
coach’:
Simply go for a run and listen to your favorite music. Sensoria® will provide you with
audio cues to improve your running form, cheer you up, push you to reach your goals, in
real-time, when you need it, and after your run, to keep you motivated (Heapsylon LLC,
2014).
Likewise, Nintendo’s family of Wii Fit games feature virtual trainers who monitor activity
through the motion-tracking Balance Board, in turn delivering encouragement and advice as
necessary (e.g., see Nintendo, 2011a). The point is for consumers to change their behaviour in
the interest of fit living, creating conditions for receiving further feedback and perpetuating the
cycle of interactivity. Fitness participants are thus asked not just to be fit but ‘iFit’, as per the app
that bears this name.
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3) The second fitness boom is data intensive
A corollary of the above point is that fitness becomes data-intensive. There is a shift underway
from the dissemination of (largely qualitative) fitness information to the human/non-human coconstruction of (largely quantitative) fitness data.
Specifically, the new fitness boom is geared towards the production of ‘small data’: “the
output of a whole host of pervasive tracking processes about any one individual user” (Neff,
2013: 188; also see Lu, 2013). Undergirding this is the dual-pronged ethos of ‘track everything’
and ‘track anytime’. The latter is a function mainly of the newfound portability of fitness
technologies. The MyFitnessPal app, for example, is promoted in part through the tagline, ‘Track
your health from anywhere, anytime’ (MyFitnessPal, Inc., 2015). MapMyFitness’ smartphonecompatible activity tracking application software is sold in similar fashion: ‘Your workout, your
device, anywhere, anytime’ (MapMyFitness, Inc., 2014). The former exhortation – track
everything – speaks to the sheer breadth of candidates for ‘datafication’ at present: heart rate,
breathing rate, speed and duration of movement, movement trajectories (through geo-tracking),
body composition, balance, centre of gravity, and far beyond. To be sure, qualitative fitness
information persists, and devices like Nintendo’s Wii Fit still position enclosed, domestic
contexts as spaces for fitness tracking. The point, though, is that once skin is made algorithmic
(Williamson, 2015) through sensor-based fitness technologies, questions of what fitness data
might be produced and where it might be produced are more open than ever before. Data might
thus be ‘small’ in pertaining to the singular individual, but at the same time it is growing ever
larger in scope.
Indeed, arriving in combination with the ‘track everything/anytime’ imperative are
overarching data aggregation platforms, including those supplied by Microsoft, Apple, and
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Google. The architecture of the Apple Health Kit, Microsoft Health, and Google Fit platforms is
such that data from different devices can be assembled together. For example, the benefits of
Apple’s Health Kit are described online to developers as follows:
Users benefit, since they don’t need to manually set up the connections between their apps or
import and export their data. Importantly, users still control which apps can read and write
data to the HealthKit store – and exactly what pieces of data each app has access to.
However, as soon as the user grants permission, apps can freely and frictionlessly access
each other’s data (Apple Inc., 2015a).
Thus, while the new fitness boom first rests on the generation of small data (i.e., pertaining to the
self) in large quantities, the next step is for this data to become part of an even larger, industryhosted dataset. It is not just the fitness participant that is imagined as mobile at the current
moment (track anywhere, anytime); in a ‘frictionless’ online fitness landscape, the fitness
participant’s data is understood as mobile too. Per point 1, action in the new fitness boom
involves conglomerates of surprising agencies. Points 2 and 3 together suggest that action
happens, in the manner described by Nikolas Rose (2007), ‘at a distance’. Apple’s description of
its Health Kit goes on to imagine a situation whereby a specific app changes its metrics or advice
for a given user based on data compiled on the Health Kit platform (Apple Inc., 2015a).
Governance over health is ‘devolved’ to the individual user, but can also be scaled back up to
fitness/technologies companies keen on compiling exceedingly large datasets.
4) The second fitness boom is customizable
As MacNeill (1998) remarks in discussing fitness videos, the fitness boom of the 1970s and
1980s itself brought heightened choice for consumers. If Jane Fonda was deemed unpalatable as
a celebrity fitness adviser, the fitness catalogues endorsed by Cher or Cindy Crawford might be
found appealing instead. Even so, the new fitness boom is deeply personal: it is not merely about
choice, but customization in fitness participation.
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On the surface, the place of customization in the new fitness boom is readily apparent. Per
points 2 and 3 above, to ‘track everything’ from heart rate to blood glucose to distance travelled
during exercise with the help of a non-human ‘trainer’ is to register idiosyncratic fitness data.
The Apple Watch provides another case in point: ‘Apple Watch is designed with customisable
coaching reminders that will help you reach your Move, Exercise and Stand goals each day, and
use your success to motivate you to pursue new milestones’ (Apple Inc., 2015b). To ‘track
anywhere’ is to fit such activity into one’s own schedule – as opposed, for example, to tuning in
to a fitness television program at a pre-determined time. But why is customization significant? In
one sense, customization is important in enabling the claim that fitness technologies know no
specific user. The Wii was designed as a console ‘for everyone’, aimed at transcending the
stereotypical gaming demographic. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that Wii Fit Plus workouts
can suit ‘everyone’s’ fitness needs (Nintendo, 2011b). The above-described Sensoria® line of
biometric clothing is likewise said to stem from the idea that everyone has a unique lifestyle and
approach to fitness – the implication being that these can all be catered to with the same
technology (Heapsylon, 2014). Customization too can reach ‘backstage’ into production. There’s
an Apple Watch ‘for everyone’ in that consumers can meddle in design, selecting a particular
screen size, alloy, and strap, among other features, for their specific product (Apple Inc., 2015c).
Fitness technologies, then, can be tailored to one’s specific needs and thus to anyone’s specific
needs. Through customization, ‘for everyone’ becomes a third selling point, alongside ‘track
everything’ and ‘track anytime’.
In another, related sense, customization is important in that it is key to optimization. In
Nikolas Rose’s (2007) terms, the technologies described to this point are ‘technologies of life’:
they reveal invisible pathologies and/or allow the pursuit of self-optimization (p. 19). For the
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former, consider for example how a measure like Body Mass Index (BMI) – registered through
Fitbit’s Aria™ Wi-Fi Smart Scale and Nintendo’s game Wii Fit Plus, among other technologies
– is implicitly a risk assessment in that it categorizes the fitness participant as normal,
under/overweight, or obese. The aforementioned app iFit provides another case in point: it relays
a daily net calorie score, ‘So you always know when you’re in the healthy, harmful, or weight
loss range’ (iFit.com, n.d.). Optimization, meanwhile, emerges when fitness moves from a matter
of statistical analysis to one characterized by the ongoing pursuit of (rather vague) forms of selfbetterment – that is, when it moves from measurement to lifestyle. This is the case, for example,
when fitness consumers are urged to set upon quests that are by nature unending – to ‘sleep
better’, ‘manage weight’, and ‘get active’, for example. The logic of optimization furthermore
appears in the depiction of fitness tracking as an avenue to empowerment. As said in the
promotion of OMsignal’s biometric apparel: ‘Discover how your body responds to your daily
activities. Be empowered to make a change and take control of your health’ (OMsignal, 2015).
Fitbit’s underpinning ‘mission’ is likewise characteristic of the interactive fitness era: “To
empower and inspire you to live a healthier, more active life” (Fitbit Inc., 2015).
Taken together, customization both broadens the fitness market (fitness is for everyone)
and makes fitness an ongoing pursuit (empowerment knows no specific end). From a health
promotion perspective, customization thus extends the focus on personalization – and, indeed,
personal responsibility – that has long been part of the healthism imperative. As Deborah Lupton
contends (2012), this is the apotheosis of self-reflexivity: fitness consumers have more ‘tools’
than ever before to ‘take control’ of their lives, plus the promise that these tools are adaptable to
their specific needs. From a political economic perspective, the implications of customization are
equally significant. For Lupton (2012) again, the arrival of mobile health and fitness
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technologies means that “the health promoter is able to insert her- or himself even more
insistently into the private world of others, accessing them in any location in which their mobile
device accompanies them” (p. 241). But this notion can be inverted too: the logic of ‘track
everything’ and ‘track any time’ insistently puts the commodity at the center of experience in any
location. More than that, it ostensibly does so ‘for everyone’. Fitness in these ways is an ideal
vehicle for commercialism – a point that is further developed below.
5) The second fitness boom is networked
And yet, as fitness interventions are personalized, the second fitness boom at once reinscribes the
contemporary trend towards ‘networked individualism’. The networked individualism concept,
as per Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman (2012), bespeaks a situation whereby individuals can
already, and will increasingly, “seek, scan, sift, sort through, and make sense of more and more
information on their own.” At the same time, so too can those so motivated, “locate and join
forces with others who have sought the same material or shared similar paths of experience and
exploration” (p. 280). Online networks in turn are typically navigated with ‘flexible autonomy’:
they can be entered into and left with relative ease, the trade-off being that they are less stable
and perhaps then less dependable than their material analogues. We have already seen how
fitness participants in the new fitness boom are ‘brought together’ through data aggregation. This
fifth point pertains more to the fact that these same individuals, with technology in hand, can
communicate as they might have once at the actual gym.
Returning to Fitbit marketing, the following passage is used online to appeal to potential
consumers:
We believe you're more likely to reach your goals if you're having fun and feeling
empowered along the way. That's why Fitbit connects you with your community. See your
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friends’ achievements, challenge them on the leaderboard, and encourage each other to go
further (Fitbit Inc., 2014c).
The aforementioned weight loss application Lose It! is similarly inclined. Lose It!’s appeal to
consumers comes replete with the proclamation that ‘In person meetings are so last century’.
What the app offers instead is ‘Accountability 2.0’: ‘With friends, groups, forums, and
challenges, Lose It! takes peer support into the 21st century. Who needs weekly meetings when
you have a 24/7 support network in the palm of your hand?’ (FitNow, Inc., 2015). In the case of
both of these technologies, consumers are made producers, and thus prosumers, once again, this
time in a way that allows for peer-to-peer sharing. Community engagement is furthermore
brought together with the logic of self-empowerment. In Lose It!’s case specifically, online
fitness communities are depicted as an improvement on face-to-face encounters.
Accountability 2.0 furthermore suggests others are watching you, and perhaps passing
judgment as well. Online fitness communities indeed introduce lateral surveillance into the
‘assemblage’ of surveillance mechanisms (Haggerty and Ericson, 2000) featured as part of this
new fitness era. That is to say, the second fitness boom is not simply a matter of ‘haptic control’
based on tactility through smart garments or the Wii’s technology-flesh interface (Millington,
2009), nor simply a matter of self-surveillance among participants through the strategic
monitoring of fitness data (see Humphreys, 2011). Rather, the ‘the work of watching’ fitness
activity (Andrejevic, 2005) now falls to remotely located peers as well.
The networking functions of new fitness technologies thus massively expand the
communities with which fitness participants can interact, though perhaps with the trade-off of
lessened stability. In the first fitness boom, fitness gyms were key sites for face-to-face
encounters with trainers and like-minded fitness enthusiasts. As described above, this new fitness
era first proclaims that the former can be replaced with non-human analogues – automated
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‘coaches’ delivering feedback in real time, for example. Like-minded fitness enthusiasts are
evidently deemed replaceable too, at least in so far as they appear in the flesh. Jawbone’s
UP® app, for instance, is on the one hand a ‘Smart Coach’ helping consumers make healthy
choices, and on the other a tool for linking with family and friends so users can ‘Get better
together’ (Jawbone, 2015).
What this fifth point means in relation to the changing nature of fitness is that personal
responsibility – long central to the healthism imperative – takes on a new dimension.
‘Accountability 2.0’ suggests as much: autonomous and reflexive fitness activity is not just a
matter of generating customized fitness data, but of seeking out support as needed. Moreover,
what networked individualism does is make technologies mediators/intermediaries in (human)
fitness participants’ interactions. Said otherwise, it puts commercial technologies at the centre of
fitness participants’ interactions. If in person meetings were ‘last century’, this century’s
meetings are carried out on industry platforms, and thus industry’s terms.
6) The second fitness boom is commodified
In the first instance, the second fitness boom continues the sale of ‘tools’ for getting fit. A trip to
Fitbit’s online store yields encounters with a wide selection of products: the aforementioned
Flex™ Wireless Activity + Sleep Wristband ($99.95 USD) and Aria™ Wi-Fi Smart Scale
($129.95); the One™ Wireless Activity + Sleep Tracker ($99.95); the Zip™ Wireless Activity
Tracker ($59.95); charging cables ($19.95); a belt holster ($9.95) – the list goes on from there
(Fitbit Inc., 2014e). Software is of course purchasable too. Celebrity trainer Jillian Michaels’
eponymously named iPhone app has an upgrade option ($3.99/week) that unlocks a variety of
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premium features, such as voice messages from Michaels herself, message board access, and a
host of new exercises (see Apple Inc., 2014).
At the same time, with fitness participation becoming a data-intensive enterprise, the work
of watching is increasingly complemented by the work of being watched (Andrejevic, 2002).
Corporate dataveillance (Clarke, 1988) enters the ‘surveillant assemblage’ as well: to codify the
body and one’s daily activities in meticulous detail is to generate data that are literally of value to
others. For example, a recent U.S. Federal Trade Commission study of twelve mobile health and
fitness apps found that consumer data was shared with 76 third parties. Included in this,
‘[f]ourteen third parties grabbed usernames, names and email addresses from the apps, while 22
received data on exercise and diet habits, medical symptom searches, zip codes, geo-location and
gender’ (Kaye, 2014; cf., Till, 2014). Indeed, as Michael Carney (2013) observes, the Terms of
Use of some prominent fitness-themed companies outline in unmistakable terms that one’s data
is not exclusively one’s own. Fitbit’s privacy policy, for example, notes that the company may
disclose ‘non-personally identifiable aggregated user data’ (e.g., on gender, height, weight, and
usage data) to, among others, advertisers and other third parties for marketing and promotion
(see Fitbit Inc., 2014f). The ‘confession’ of fitness data on social media presents another avenue
for commercialization of this kind (see Fuchs, 2012). That said, even recognizing Terms of Use,
uncertainty still lingers in such forms of data expropriation. The app MyFitnessPal provides a
fitting case in point. As technology writer Tarun Wadhwa (2015) remarks with respect to Under
Armour’s recent acquisition of this product, from an industry point of view the granularity of
user data “is unlike anything a clothing company would be able to collect on their own.” For
fitness participants, though, the picture is perhaps different: “despite agreeing to the terms of
service, most of [MyFitnessPal’s] users probably wouldn’t have even considered the possibility
17
of their data changing hands” (Wadhwa, 2015). Those keen to capitalize on the newfound dataintensiveness of fitness participation are actants in the new fitness boom as well.
Of course, audiences/consumers – or, at least, their ‘watching time’ (Jhally and Livant,
1986) – have long been ‘sold’ to advertisers in the name of surplus value (cf., Smythe, 2006).
Writes Christian Fuchs, however (2012):
The difference between the audience commodity for traditional mass media and for the
internet is that, in the latter case, the users are also content producers who engage in
permanent creative activity, communication, community building, and content-production (p.
146).
The point, then, is that while fitness participation has long been a commercial matter, now more
than ever it is a matter of producing surplus value through ‘datafication’, at least in part (see
Millington, 2014b; Till, 2014). It is understandable that ‘everyone’ would be urged to ‘track
everything’ at ‘any time’ in pursuit of empowerment if the data produced through such activity is
potentially commodifiable in turn.
Fit for Prosumption
Jennifer Smith Maguire’s (2008) book on the fitness industry, focused in part on its boom years
in the late 1970s and 1980s, is fittingly titled Fit for Consumption:
In an era in which health is a personal responsibility, appearances, and performances are
occupational necessities, and leisure time is increasingly spent on the work of selfimprovement, the fitness field is an example par excellence of the ways in which
individuals learn to shape bodies and selves that are “fit for consumption” (p. 3).
In the short time since Smith Maguire’s text was published, it is fair to say we have reached a
state whereby people are encouraged to be fit for and through prosumption instead. The new
fitness boom does not break entirely from that which preceded it. But it does radically extend the
first fitness boom in the ways outlined above. In doing so, we have reached an era not just where
18
fitness is a field for shaping the self, but one where fitness experience becomes a matter of
production and consumption all at once – and indeed in novel ways.
Like fitness, prosumption is far from a new phenomenon. For George Ritzer and Nathan
Jurgenson (2012), for example, the industrial revolution saw the conflation of production and
consumption in many ways: producers used raw materials, for example; consumers made their
meals. Even so, Ritzer (2014) at the same time echoes Alvin Toffler’s (1980) observations on the
contemporary ‘rise of the prosumer’ in proclaiming prosumption to be in an intensified phase.
On the consumption side – which is to say, on the side of what Ritzer (2014) calls prosumptionas-consumption – prosumption arises through technologies and design features that put people to
‘work’: self-serve ATM machines and fuel stations; do-it-yourself supermarket checkout
counters; and, most all, Web 2.0, what with user-generated data being Web 2.0’s defining
feature. On the prosumption-as-production side, prosumption remains a salient concept in that
producing goods and services still demands the investment of time, energy, and resources on
workers’ and business’ behalf.
But Ritzer (2014) also points to the growing automation of prosumption as an important
trend. The (human) prosumer grows less important in both production and consumption due to
‘smart machines’ that operate in ongoing fashion without human intervention. Here Ritzer’s
diagnosis of the changing shape of prosumption overlaps with Mark Andrejevic and Mark
Burdon’s (2015) observations on the ‘sensor society’. For Andrejevic and Burdon, a key facet of
contemporary experience is not just that we produce data in copious amounts, it is that data is
produced automatically through environmental and wearable sensor applications that respond to
stimuli and generate processable outputs. Examples abound: ‘car seats with heart-rate monitors,
desks with thermal sensors, phones with air quality monitors, tablets that track our moods, and so
19
on’ (p. 22; cf., Kalantar-Zadeh and Wlodarski, 2013). In the ‘sensor society’ we generate more
than we participate (p. 20). As said above, interactivity is oftentimes ‘passive-ized’, at least on
the human side of things.
Prosumption pervades the six above-described characteristics of the new fitness boom.
‘Truth devices’ are consumed in the making of Fitbit’s algorithms, for example; fitness
networking – ‘Accountability 2.0’ – through forums, message boards, and other forms of social
media involves producing and consuming fitness information at one and the same time. Yet in
keeping with the work of Ritzer (2014) and Andrejevic and Burdon (2015), where the new
fitness boom is most significant is in its automation of data production. Human fitness
participants certainly remain active in some ways. They are still exercising, after all, and data
production requires at least a modicum of ‘backstage’ labour (e.g., affixing Misfit’s Shine
tracking device to the body or setting up the Nintendo Wii Fit). But, as shown above, fitness is
increasingly a matter of delegating responsibility to non-human sensors such as wearable activity
trackers – sensors that in turn register customized and potentially commodifiable data in large
quantities without fitness participants’ active involvement. Even data sharing can be subject to
automation: Fitbit’s Aria™ Wi-Fi Smart Scale, among other, similar devices, gives the option to
automatically upload self-measures to Facebook and Twitter (Fitbit Inc., 2014d). Connecting
with friends and partaking in lateral surveillance is in this sense ‘passive-ized’ from the fitness
participant’s perspective as well.
Understood in this way, the above analysis in one sense suggests that the logic and practice
of prosumption is impacting on fitness, not just in its form but in its political economy. Three
decades ago, Alan Ingham (1985) characterized the growing emphasis on lifestyle politics as ‘an
ideological resolution for the fiscal crisis of the Welfare State within the framework of consumer
20
culture’ (p. 50). This is much the same as Crawford’s (1980, 2006) assessment of how the
healthism imperative fortified the ‘common sense’ of neoliberalism. In both accounts, the self is
construed as a site for investment en route to an empowered state. Active living is good living.
As shown above, the second fitness boom in many ways redoubles this logic. Fitness becomes
more personal through customization; it is made more interactive through the reciprocal
exchange of data between people and things. But in producing data as much as they consume it –
perhaps automatically – fitness participants can now create economic value from what once had
value in terms of health benefits or personal satisfaction alone (cf., Till, 2014). Fitness
participation – cycling, jogging, and so on – becomes a commodity in itself, and not just an
activity in which commodities are involved. Thus, fitness still aligns ideologically with
neoliberalism through the logic of personal responsibility. The point is that prosumption puts
fitness and neoliberalism in alignment in a material sense to an even greater extent as well.
Fitness is further commercialized in that data is made a source of value.
At the same time, this relationship works in the other direction too: fitness propels
prosumption forward. In theorizing prosumption, and particularly its automation, Ritzer (2014) is
more attuned to the nature of prosumption in production and consumption and to empirical cases
in point than he is to prosumption’s underpinning logics. From industry’s perspective, such logic
is perhaps obvious: consumption is inherent to production (materials need be used to make other
materials, for example) and automated prosumption-as-production can perhaps heighten
efficiency. But for consumers (that is, prosumers-as-consumers), prosumption means more work
– why partake, then? A similar question can be asked in relation to Andrejevic and Burdon’s
(2015) observations on the ‘sensor society’. Industry’s desire to collect and aggregate data – to
‘know’ their customers through sensing technologies – makes sense. But what fuels the
21
generation of data at the level of the individual? In some ways, automated prosumption is
inescapable for consumers too. A do-it-yourself supermarket checkout might be all that is
available; sensing technology is increasingly embedded in the environment, and as such is hard
to avoid. But the second fitness boom also points to the ways in which prosumption is said to be
‘good for you’ – indeed, good ‘for everyone’. As above, the fitness products discussed herein are
technologies of life, marketed in part as tools for optimization and empowerment. Thus, while
data collection and aggregation are understandable from industry’s perspective – a ‘frictionless’
data landscape is one where the fitness participant is more easily known – on the ground level
these processes are underpinned by the promise of ‘a healthier, more active life’, as per Fitbit’s
mission statement. The (ceaseless) quest for fit living makes the ‘datafying’ of once ‘undatafied’
aspects of daily life a rational thing to do.
The above-described characteristics are intended to serve a heuristic purpose, and not to be
a final diagnosis of the second fitness boom. Indeed, this new era of fitness raises a host of
conceptual and empirical questions. How does receiving customizing fitness assessments (as is
possible with new fitness technologies) compare to receiving more generic fitness information
(as was common with fitness technologies of old)? Are such customized assessments more or
less powerful, or more or less debatable, than if rendered by a human expert? What impediments
– structural or personal – inhibit ‘tracking everything’ at ‘anytime’, despite the claim that fitness
technologies are universally appealing? In the new fitness boom, much remains unclear. What is
clear is that fitness technologies, as Jeremy Packer (2013) says of media in general, are no longer
simply for transmitting information, but for recording it, storing it, and processing it – often
automatically. The fitness participant is scrutinized more intensely and by more actants than ever
before. Charles Atlas, in the interwar years, and Jane Fonda, in the first fitness boom, could only
22
implore and direct their consuming audiences through media. The new purveyors of fitness know
no such restraints.
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