Kirsten Frandsen

Self-tracking as communication

Self-tracking has attracted a lot of attention from researchers and public opinion makers owing to its potential for improving life conditions through preemptive action on health, and as a tool of user empowerment vis-à-vis health-care professionals and private and public institutions. Nevertheless, the ‘stuff’ that is typically tracked – exercise and diet being the dominant tracking activities – refers to cultural and social practices that, for the individual user, are utterly mundane and reside in an experiential realm of everyday life. Self-tracking has to be understood in relation to behavior that is predominantly about getting things done in ways that are possible, suitable and meaningful for the individual. To account for this, we propose to conceptualize self-tracking as a communicative phenomenon along three dimensions: communication with the system, the self and social networks of peers. We develop the theoretical framework, drawing upon empirical findings from a qualitative study on how self-tracking is practiced and experienced in the context of exercise by different categories of empirical users. We demonstrate that the meanings of self-tracking practices are, at once, shaped by the motivation of an individual user who is situated in a broader web of everyday activities, and stimulated and augmented by communicative features provided by the technology.

Sports Organizations in a New Wave of Mediatization

This article explores the transforming effects of digital media in sports organizations. The approach to this is an analytical focus on a wide range of sports, which are examined from an institutional and organizational approach to mediatization theory. On the basis of an empirical study of governing sports organizations (national sports federations), it is demonstrated that digital media are a major concern across organizations and that a new wave of mediatization is taking place in sports. Still, many organizations struggle with this and currently find themselves in a state of flux, trying to involve employees, volunteers, and external partners with communication competencies in their activities in various ways, on many levels, and for many varying purposes. Consequently, one of the significant effects of digital media is a dispersion of communication involving more people and concurrent increase in internal complexity in many organizations. Mediatization is therefore a process that is very much in operation at many levels and at various speeds, but it also takes organizations in diverse directions. Using Thornton and Ocasio’s interinstitutional approach and concept of institutional logics, it is argued and demonstrated that this is because these sports organizations have other relevant and powerful institutional partners or organizations that need to be considered in the process as well.