Fitness Blogging as a New Social Practice and Its Implications for Young Women’s Mental Health

Abstract

This work relies on an assumption of L.S. Vygotsky’s cultural-historical psychology that a person’s development occurs through interiorizing of cultural norms, rules, customs, and various standards. Body and beauty standards and ideal body concepts have considerably varied in the course of time, while girls tend to assimilate them at an early age through playing with fashion dolls, looking at the magazine images, etc. [4; 10; 11; 26]. Since the beginning of the 21st century, these standards have been rapidly changing over the past 20 years: from an unnaturally thin body at the beginning of the century to an athletic frame with a thin waist, pumped up abs, and strong arm muscles at the present time [4; 10]. The contemporary cultural and social space is associated with an upsurge in information technologies and mass media development. Various mass media such as television, radio, magazines, and the Internet, have been continuously informing people that they need to conform to unrealistic beauty ideals. Social media have become an important source of various standards and norms in the 21st century. Over the past few years, social media users have found another way to actively engage in them, namely by running fitness blogs with images of athletic bodies. There has been a rise in the popularity of fitness blogs whose authors post images of their athletic bodies and present themselves as “inspiring people”. These blogs have become almost a cult due to carefully selected, beautifully designed and compelling content [24]. At first glance, social media fitness culture contributes to healthy eating, develops exercise habits, and promotes the idea that achieving one’s ideal body shape is within one’s power. However a lot of studies show that it is the mass media that trigger an increase in body disFitness Blogging as a New Social Practice and Its Implications for Young Women’s Mental Health