When Goffman meet fitness apps: Self-presentation and performance in online fitness

In recent years, people have paid more attention to health issues due to increasingly decreased immunity and promotion of the importance of health. Therefore, an increasing number of people have joined in the health industry, and more online fitness products or apps have been designed to cater to this trend. The percentage of fitness app addicts is very high: more than 25% of users visit their fitness app more than 10 times a week (figure 1).

Firgure 1
Source: Flurry Analytics, All Devices, 08/2017

However, how many people follow the exercising program regularly? According to Tencent news, in China, 400 million residences participate in exercise activities on a daily basis, but 100 million people pretend to keep fit as well. Some people who join in the membership in the gym and purchase expensive activewear spend more time on posting their working out photos or record on social media rather than real exercise. From a sociological perspective, according to Goffman’s Dramaturgical theory, “Frontstage” is a standard expressive equipment used by individuals intentionally or unintentionally during their performance. Conversely, “backstage” is actions that may undermine the impression that people are trying to create. Then，how people manipulate the front stage and backstage is called impression management. 

In the field of health social media, “front stage”may refer to beautified or retouched photos or videos, while the real figure and bad eating habits are hidden behind computers and mobile phones. By sharing fitness photos and records, numbers of users meet their need to be adored and recognised in those positive comments of others. To gain more self-satisfaction, some indulge in finding the perfect selfie angle and ignore the exercise of defective body parts. There are even posts on social media that teach you how to take better pictures in the gym (figure 2). Such posts are very popular, so it can be seen that many people go to the gym for symbolic check-in, not to actually exercise.

Figure 2

Those carefully designed ideal-selves are criticized by scholars such as Sherry Turkle. Nevertheless, performing bodies by fake photos cannot last for the long-term. According to Goffman, unexpected break-in of a few uninvited audiences may destroy performers’ well-designed stages. It is difficult for people to calculate exactly how many potential viewers they have. For example, a Chinese singer has been hotly debated by netizens because of the difference between the figure in the official promotional photo and the audience ’s real viewing (figure 3). 

Figure 3

The concept of ‘poetics of infrastructure’ emphasizes its aesthetic significance, evoking people’s affect of keeping fit through the self-presentation on the social platforms. Similarly, the discipline theory of Foucault’s highlights the role of individual bodies in the diffusion of power across society. Shaping better side on social platforms to create and interact with the network that promotes the flow of value is also an optimization of the infrastructure to some extent.

References:

Goffman, E. (1978). The presentation of self in everyday life (p. 56). London: Harmondsworth.

Turkle, S. (2017). Alone together: Why we expect more from technology and less from each other. Hachette UK.

Chenyu Dong,Yiran Ding. (2018). When Goffman Meets the Internet-Self Presentation and Performance in Social Media. Journalism and Writing, (1), 13. (in Chinese)

Lupton, D. (2013). Quantifying the body: monitoring and measuring health in the age of mHealth technologies. Critical Public Health, 23(4), 393-403. 

Larkin, B. (2013). The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure. Annual Review of Anthropology, 42(1), 327-343.

Online Resources:

Jiwu. (2020). Modern people pretend to be confused by fitness at a glance: as long as you apply for a card, you will soon lose weight. Retrived from: https://new.qq.com/omn/20200102/20200102A07ZB400.html

Netimperative. (2017). Health and fitness app usage “grew 330% in just 3 years” Retrived from: http://www.netimperative.com/2017/09/health-fitness-app-usage-grew-330-just-3-years/

Jessica Lockrem and Adonia Lugo. (2012). Infrastructure. Retrived from: https://journal.culanth.org/index.php/ca/catalog/category/infrastructure

Forensic Architecture: Affect and Insecurity

Forensic Architecture is a research agency and eponymous academic field, developed at Goldsmith University London, which performs advanced spatial and media investigation into human rights violation cases, and the “production and presentation of architectural evidence—relating to buildings, urban environments—within legal and political processes” (Forensic Architecture, 2020).

The practice developed in response to an emerging assemblage of phenomena and infrastructural relations – namely urbanisation of warfare, state insecurity, and proliferation of digital technology such as open source media and smart phone documentation. Using advanced computational modelling and reconstruction techniques (including digital models, virtual reality environments and animations), layered over analysis of spatial information captured by photographic, audio and testimonial evidence, Forensic Architecture works with citizens, journalists and NGOs to investigate and reanimate events of human rights violations.

This work is typically located in contexts of state insecurity, for example Israel-Palestine conflicts, where the official channels of justice and enquiry are mediated by forms political violence and corruption. In this way, Forensic Architecture’s work serves to reproduce and uncover new details of cases using objective modes of evidential enquiry.

Omar Bin Abdul Aziz Hospital (Aleppo, Syria) was struck 14 times by munitions fired by the Syrian army, including cluster and barrel bombs. Within a digital model, Forensic Architecture corroborated multiple sources of CCTV footage to support claims that Syria and its allies were intentionally targeting civilian hospitals.
Source: Forensic Architecture

Regarding the production of evidence using the techniques of Forensic Architecture, we might consider the existence of ‘affect’ – “visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing…” – in the reproduction and computation of evidence (Gregg & Seigworth, 2010). Forensic Architecture’s strengths are in their advanced skills and networks of investigation, layering information (i.e. time sequencing audio recordings over video footage, then modelling the composite environment) to find new paths to evidence. In this, we could perhaps identify an element of affect ‘mediating’ their actions and ability to interpret certain data (Latour, n.d.)[1].

Interestingly, the adoption of new forms of digital evidentiary presentation has been slow in the West[2], specifically regarding its admissibility in court, with a leading argument being that presenting evidence digitally ascribes a higher level of objectivity to the information presented (Moore). In this way we might also understand this as concern about affect. This is not to say that affect is not at play when a jury is given verbal and diagrammatic accounts of bullet trajectories – that their ability to interpret the information is not ‘mediated’ (Latour, n.d.) by their embodied predispositions or dispositif’ (Foucault, cited by Gregg & Seigworth, 2010). However, Digital evidence by contrast presents as a kind of high resolution information – the aesthetics and modes of visualisation might appear to reference a greater depth of knowledge, when the source material is the same (a 3D model is reads differently to a hand drawing over a photo) (Hauser, 2014). In this argument, the jury may be swayed by affect, mediated by the mode presentation.

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• [1] I say this lightly though, as the cycled argument against the validity of Forensic Architecture work (by the regimes they inherently expose) is that it is coloured by activism, discrediting the legitimacy of the evidence their work produces.
• [2] Where it might be argued that political violence isn’t perceived at same scale as in states of active conflict.

References:

• Forensic Architecture. (2020, 01 04). About. Retrieved from Forensic Architecture: https://forensic-architecture.org/about/agency
• Gregg, M. and Seigworth, G. J. (2010) The affect theory reader. Durham [N.C.]: Duke University Press.
• Houser, H. (2014) ‘The Aesthetics of Environmental Visualizations: More than Information Ecstasy?’, Public Culture. Duke University Press, 26(2 73), pp. 319–337. doi: 10.1215/08992363-2392084
• Latour, B., n.d. On Technical Mediation, s.l.: bruno-latour.fr.
• Moore, L. (2019) [first-hand: this comes from experience working for the Ministry of Justice].
• Gregg, M. and Seigworth, G. J. (2010) The affect theory reader. Durham [N.C.]: Duke University Press.

Tracking the Sublime

Oura

Oura is a multi-sensor ring that monitors and cross-examines your sleep as well as daytime activity to produce a “readiness score”. This score can then be used to inform the user’s behaviour change (how bedtime/diet may impact sleep quality) to gradually and ultimately optimise one’s health and performance. Affect, understood loosely (and should perhaps only be understood as such), is an ineffable, dynamic quality that evokes an “ongoing”, felt connection between the body (self) and the world (physical or otherwise) (Seigworth and Gregg, 2010). Reflecting on the desensitising effects of academic training, Navaro-Yashin (2003) has urged readers to think and write affectively as a way to textually reconstruct subjective experience both of the writer and the research participants. In this case, placed next to one another, Oura and affect seem to constitute a juxtaposition of rationality and emotion. Yet, it is precisely through this apparent opposition that we may truly grasp the essence of Oura.

My Oura app

The above screenshots show a little readiness score, as an “objective” evaluation of the state of your existence, presented with a picture of nature and a description of what to expect from the day ahead. It seems as though the interface is a temporary portal through which the user’s position in the world is united and materialised. Robbins (2002) has described this abrupt, intense visualisation of unity as “sublimity”. Meanwhile, perhaps also reflected in this is the influential role played by technological gadgets, as objects of rationality, in popular culture, to which Ames (2018) has referred as the technological sublime – the “astonishment, awe, terror, and psychic distance – feelings once reserved for natural wonders or intense spiritual experiences” ( p.2).

Oura ring paired with a “ripped physique”

So, what really is Oura? It is simultaneously an object, a practice, a feeling, and also a series of catchy slogans (see picture above). Yet, listing out all these miscellaneous facades rationally remains unhelpful to understand a ‘thing’ that, if you dig deep enough, cuts through all domains of everyday life to the crux of our existence (why should I track myself, why do I want better sleep, productivity to what ends, why should one wake up, and so on). Here, we reach the edge of rationality and are tempted with an infinite number of just-so theories.

As the “ongoing-ness” of life is given a new, numeric mode of existence constructed according to different biological metrics, the sublimity manufactured by Oura transcends the ephemeral “moment of insight accompanied by a surge of power” (Robbins, 2002, p. 85), and blends into a sustained form of concreteness. In a world of decaying scientific authority and contradictory expert opinion (Beck, Giddens, and Lash, 1994), self-trackers like Oura may “reliably” step in to tell you how to live an everyday life that seems at times mundane, tasteless, and disorienting (work hard enough and at least you get a picture of sunshine).

References

Ames, M. G. (2018). Deconstructing the algorithmic sublime, Big Data & Society.

Beck, U. Giddens, A. and Lash, S. (1994). Reflexive modernization : Politics, tradition and aesthetics in modern social order. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Navaro-Yashin, Y. (2003) ‘`Life is dead here’: Sensing the political in `no man’s land’’, Anthropological Theory, 3(1), pp. 107–125.  

Robbins, B. (2002). The Sweatship Sublime. PMLA, 117 (1), pp. 84-97.

Seigworth, G and Gregg, M. (2010). An Inventory of Shimmers. Introduction to the Affect Theory Reader. Durham: Duke University Press.