Brad Millington

Smartphone Apps and the Mobile Privatization of Health and Fitness

This paper presents an in-depth study of prominent health and fitness-themed smartphone apps. Results of the study first highlight the emphasis placed on self-improvement with apps such as MyFitnessPal, as activities including exercise tracking are deemed means for achieving health and fitness goals. At the same time, and in the style of “mobile privatization,” apps connect individual users to the “outside world” as well, mainly by facilitating network ties between (and further surveillance of) like-minded consumers. This activity is said to be possible “on the go,” as apps capitalize on the portable nature of smartphone hardware. Acknowledging that these ways of “conducting conduct” might engender productive and rewarding outcomes, the paper concludes with critical reflections on the app model of service provision and its alliance with a neoliberal approach to health and fitness promotion.

Amusing Ourselves to Life: Fitness Consumerism and the Birth of Bio-Games

Against the common perception that media consumption engenders inactivity, in recent years the technology sector has developed an extensive catalogue of games for bodily and cognitive exercise. Despite their popularity, however, and despite their potential ability to affect perceptions and experiences of health and fitness, there remains a shortage of academic research on video games of this kind. Drawing from earlier studies, the central contribution of this article lies in the introduction of “bio-play” and “bio-games” as terms for conceptualizing these new fitness products. The former term refers to the conjoining of self-care—specifically, self-assessments, surveillance, and discipline—and entertainment in games such as Nintendo’s Wii Fit; the latter refers to the technological genre as a whole that is characterized by such activity. The prefix “bio” in each case reflects the contribution of new fitness technologies to the broader conjuncture in which they are located—namely, their discursive and material support of the (neoliberal) presumption that biological “self-improvement” is achievable through the marketplace. Acknowledging their possible benefits, in this analysis I also highlight concerns associated with the arrival of bio-games. These include the relations underlying the production of these technologies, their manner of proffering fitness services, and their representations of the “ideal” body and brain. I close by outlining challenges for researchers, educators, and policymakers that follow from industry’s newfound promise that, with the help of new media, we can amuse ourselves to life.

Use it or lose it: ageing and the politics of brain training

This paper reports findings from a qualitative study of promotional websites for three prominent ‘brain games’ – that is, consumer technologies designed to train and improve the brain through challenging cognitive exercises. The study was specifically designed to critically examine how brain training is promoted as a viable endeavour and how brain games are made to intervene in cognitive functioning. The analysis of online promotion revealed three overlapping themes: (1) the deployment of expertise in game marketing to make brain training intelligible; (2) the deployment of risk metrics in game software to ‘screen and intervene’ in cognitive health; and (3) the deployment of ‘third party’ sources to corroborate brain training’s value, especially for older adults. These findings are used as a basis to contend that brain training technologies are simultaneously enabling and constraining. Against the historical practice of seeing ageing and cognitive ‘decline’ as biopolitical threats, brain games imagine seniors as empowered and capable of sustaining their identity work into retirement. At the same time, these products invoke common anxieties surrounding later life and, in keeping with the politics of neoliberalism, exacerbate the pressure on older persons to demonstrate an obvious ‘will to health’ through ongoing consumerism.

Context Masculinities: Media Consumption, Physical Education, and Youth Identities:

This article reports findings from a qualitative case study undertaken at a Vancouver high school designed to examine the role of media and physical education (PE) in shaping how young males (n = 36) understand and practice gender. The authors were specifically concerned with developing a nuanced understanding of how interpretations of masculinity relate to performances of masculinity and how interpretations and performances vary depending on social context and according to a youth’s social positioning. Findings revealed how participants criticized media portrayals of “hegemonic masculinities” (i.e., muscular, aggressive, and hyper-heterosexual masculinities) while simultaneously celebrating these same gender identities in PE. The authors used these findings as a foundation for arguing that (a) youth are flexible in their interpretations/performances of masculinity according to context; (b) the participants, in critiquing portrayals of hypermasculinity in media and supporting less radical versions of hegemonic masculinity in PE, were creating personal narratives around masculinity as a potential strategy for coping with feelings of disembodiment and disembeddedness; and (c) students’ critiques of gender portrayals, although offering symbolic challenges to the contemporary gender order, are nonetheless limited by structures that normalize hegemonic masculinities.

Making Chinese-Canadian masculinities in Vancouver's physical education curriculum

Our paper illustrates how males of Chinese descent in British Columbia (BC) have historically been victims of overt and subtle forms of discrimination, and describes how racism is and was integrally linked to notions of class, gender and the body. Highlighted in our historical overview are issues around race and masculinity for Chinese males as they existed (and still exist) in the BC educational system, especially in sport-related and physical education (PE) contexts. We examine how some of these issues continue to impact Vancouvers schools through Millingtons (2006) study of masculinities in secondary PE which showed how that environment, while offering the potential for various masculinities to flourish, tended to promote hegemonic gender identities as ‘normal’. In particular, we show how Chinese-Canadian boys, both Canadian born as well as more recent immigrants from Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China, continue to be subject to subtle racist understandings of Chinese masculinities—understandings that are often camouflaged by the dominant national rhetoric of multiculturalism. We conclude the paper by arguing that if indeed schools’ curricula exacerbate problematic understandings of race and masculinity that underlie discriminatory behaviours and attitudes, then physical educators need the tools to develop strategies for change.

‘Quantify the Invisible’: notes toward a future of posture

This paper contributes to the literature on the phenomenon termed mHealth through a critical examination of wearable posture-tracking technologies. The paper specifically reports on a qualitative document analysis of promotional materials for three devices, carried out with the aim of assessing their mode of operation, the logic underpinning their development and their purported benefits for users. Findings initially highlight how Lumo Lift and Lumo Back, made by the company Lumo Bodytech Inc., and Prana, made by Prana Tech LLC, are designed to enable haptic surveillance and discipline whereby the body is monitored and ‘reprimanded’ through the touch. These forms of interactive posture training are underpinned by scientific insight from fields such as biomechanics and by data science on consumer posture habits. In turn, the benefits for those engaging with commercial posture-tracking devices are said to include, unsurprisingly, better posture, but also a less tangible form of ‘optimised’ living. With these findings in mind, it is argued that the arrival of interactive posture technologies has two main implications. In one sense, whereas good posture has historically been imagined as a dividing line between ‘civilized’ humans and ‘uncivilized’ others, devices such as Lumo Lift make posture into a matter of posthuman optimisation: humans and non-humans are enfolded in the pursuit of self-betterment. In another sense, posture technologies are important in emboldening the wider mHealth phenomenon, privileging as they do the idea that commercial technologies are now allies and not foes when it comes to improving health.

Video games and the political and cultural economies of health-entertainment

Focusing mainly on the company Nintendo, this paper examines the political economic and cultural forces underpinning the video game industry’s recent interest in merging entertainment and health promotion. This is a trend best exemplified in sexagenarian actress Helen Mirren’s endorsement of Nintendo’s fitness-themed game Wii Fit Plus. In one sense, ‘health-entertainment’ is deemed a product of the coercive laws of competition that impress the need for reinvestment and innovation as a way of warding off industry rivals. Nintendo’s turn to health promotion is from this perspective an extension of the ‘console wars’ that in the past drove gaming companies to pursue verisimilitude on screen in hopes of attracting (young male) consumers. In another sense, the present moment offers an ideal time to direct innovation towards the issues of health and healthy ageing in particular, as the cultural logics of healthism and the ‘third age’ both emphasise the virtues of ‘healthy’ and autonomous consumer activity. As such, Nintendo has pursued aesthetic simplicity but kinaesthetic realism as a way of extending the appeal of video gaming beyond the male youth demographic. In examining the implications of these developments, it is argued that health and entertainment, as independent constructs, are conceptually reimagined through their integration with one another. The pursuit of entertainment is made ‘responsible’, thereby remedying the concern that video gaming is an unhealthy activity. The pursuit of health, meanwhile, becomes a matter of playful, technology-enhanced and ultimately consumption-based experience.

Renovating ethnic identity on Restaurant Makeover

Food can be a novel way of understanding and explaining some of the pointed paradoxes of multiculturalism and the ‘management’ of ethnicity. Many studies of culinary culture are attentive to the exoticization of ethnicity in and through food media, which now includes a vertiginous array of cookbooks, travel literature, magazines and, most important for our purposes here, television series. Among various programs is Restaurant Makeover, a popular Canadian reality series broadcast on Home and Garden Television (HGTV) as well as the Food Network Canada. In each episode, dining experts are hired by struggling restaurateurs (often ethnic) to ‘spice up’ the existing menu, ‘modernize’ the décor and, by extension, ensure the welfare of the (immigrants) family. While the series is not explicitly directed at ethnic restaurants, it seems to be increasingly interested in ‘non-white’ establishments (i.e., Mexican, Chinese, Thai, etc.). This participation in culinary multiculturalism may be symptomatic of wider political changes in immigration and ‘diversity’ in Canada. Based on the authors analyses of specific episodes this paper argues, firstly, the growing interest in ethnic cuisine on Restaurant Makeover can be read as a (neo)liberal response to an emerging conservative ‘multicultural’ agenda that recognizes migrants predominantly as laborers (as opposed to citizens) and, secondly, that behind its rehearsal of liberal benevolence is a skewed set of power relations that authorize the experts’ (re)construction, cultivation and containment of ethnicity.

An unexceptional exception: Golf, pesticides, and environmental regulation in Canada

This paper features a critical examination of recent legislation banning cosmetic pesticide applications in the province of Ontario, Canada. It focuses in particular on the exemption of golf courses from the province’s Cosmetic Pesticides Ban Act of 2009. Drawing from a wide range of materials, the authors first contextualize Ontario’s recent law through an overview of the historical development of pre- and post-market pesticide regulation in Canada. This includes a review of the fierce debates that have at times arisen between pro- and anti-chemical factions. From there, the authors evaluate the Cosmetic Pesticides Ban Act. In one sense, the law – and especially golf’s exemption from the law – is said to exemplify “environmental managerialist” decision-making, whereby governments must satisfy a “dual mandate” of promoting economic growth and environmental sustainability simultaneously. In another, related way, it is seen as demonstrative of an “ecological modernist” approach to environmental problems in which industry-led, technologically-advanced solutions are privileged above others. Taken together, golf’s “special status” in Ontario’s new pesticide legislation is deemed reflective of a wider trend towards neoliberal environmental policy making in Canada. It is also regarded in closing as a reason for future research into sport and environmental policy.

Chapter 6 Media Analysis in Physical Cultural Studies: From Production to Reception

Purpose – To discuss the history and relevance of audience research as it pertains to sport and physical culture and to demonstrate an approach to doing audience research. Design/methodology/approach – A step-by-step overview of a study conducted by the authors is provided. The study examined ways that groups of young males in a Vancouver, Canada, high school interpreted images of masculinity in popular media, and ways these same youth performed masculinity in physical education classes. We reflect on how studying interpretations (using focus groups) and lived experiences (using participant observation and in-depth interviews) in an integrated fashion was helpful for understanding the role of media in the everyday lives of these youth. We also describe how the hegemony concept guided our data interpretation. Findings – We highlight how, on the one hand, the young males were critical of media portrayals of hegemonic forms of masculinity and, on the other hand, how these same males attempted to conform to norms associated with hegemonic masculinity in physical education classes. We emphasise that our multi-method approach was essential in allowing us to detect the incongruity between youth ‘interpretations’ and ‘performances’. Research limitations/implications – Limitations of audience research are discussed, and the epistemological underpinnings of our study are highlighted. Originality/value – The need for audience research in physical cultural studies is emphasised. We suggest that researchers too often make claims about media impacts without actually talking to audiences, or looking at what audiences ‘do’ with information they glean from media.