It has become a common occurrence to open your Instagram app and see your friends posting screenshots of their running route with their time or pace; many users see these posts by friends every day. This is such a common occurrence that gyms and fashion has changed, “Gyms are designed with sleek interiors and high-impact feature walls – all the better to post to Instagram… And while the rest of the fashion sector struggles, activewear – now not so much a genre of clothing as a way of life, led by leggings and crop tops – has become big business” (Mowbray, 2017). People now want to be able to take photos of their workout routes for the sole purpose of posting to Instagram. But unlike fitness influencers, who are able to run accounts fitness for profit, close friends may post their data for alternative reasons; but still contribute to defining fitness through a quantified self. While also unknowingly performing marketing for fitness tracking applications.
Social media is meant for “participants to document, curate, showcase and control aspects of the self, for their personal edification and with an eye to the wider audience at hand” (Trace & Zang, 2019). When people post on their account, they are presenting their identity and showcasing their lives; and for many fitness is a part of that. A study published by Journal of Documentation found that “Digital self-tracking data were therefore understood by our participants as value-added…Thus, self-tracking data were understood as forming an additional layer of information that enhances or contributes to broader understandings and self-narratives (Trace & Zang, 2019). This establishes that through using self-trackers and fitness data apps, people have come to define fitness culture through quantifying the self. If fitness is attached to their identity, then they post it on social media as part of their self-narrative. But this contributes to the overall promotion of defining fitness through the quantified self.
When you see your friends posting their workout routines you can assume it is either for validation or motivation. The study, When Personal Tracking Becomes Social: Examining the Use of Instagram for Healthy Eating, found many people share their fitness data on their accounts to motivate themselves and others. But many do so through only posting their fitness/diet tracking data. One example of a reason a participant gave for posting was, “I had a really good day, and I had gotten 16,000 or more steps, then I feel like I want to share my progress and everything with everyone” (Chung et al., 2017). Another participant explained she still outlined all of her daily meals on Instagram “…even after she reached her goal weight because she wanted to become a “source of motivation and inspiration for people” (Chung et al., 2017). When you see your friends making these types of fitness/diet posts you may think what is the harm? But this perpetuates defining fitness through the quantified self. These posts on Instagram demonstrate to friends that it isn’t just fitness influencers that are quantifying themselves, but everyone around them is. Data and tracking are what you should define fitness as and be praised by. While these posts can be argued as promoting fitness, it only promotes fitness through a definition of fitness that is quantifying the self.
Peloton has come out with the new Instagram sharing feature to keep up with the popularity of showcasing the quantified self. This feature allows users to share their workout data (output, pace, miles, calories) to personal Instagram stories for their friends to see their results (Stark, 2020). Now people can instantaneously post their workout results on their Instagram account. It is incredibly strategic because, “the best social media marketing is always going to be done by your fans, not by you, so get out of their way… Motivate your fans to create content on social networking sites for you. Organic content is much more convincing” (Serazio & Duffy, 8). Peloton is not alone in this, Nike running app, Runkeeper, and Strava are just some other examples of applications which have created data breakdowns to share on social media. This is great advertising for these applications since, “...one of the best outcomes with social media is how it can build trust in customers and the general public that ultimately adds to your bottom line” (Serazio & Duffy, 5). The trust that is being promoted is trusting these apps to quantify your fitness for you, which people download or buy since fitness is being defined by the quantified self. This is how “word-of-mouth” marketing is so powerful on social media, because it perpetuates these ideals and the brands that have the solution.
The sharing of fitness data contributes to the Instagram fitness culture by essentially advertising and promoting fitness applications that are quantifiable. Instead of posting a photo with, “I worked out today on my Peloton,” it has become, “I worked out today and here are the stats that prove it.” It leaves people in a place where they start wanting to compare their stats to their friends to see how their progress matches up. These applications quantify the self and define fitness through quantifying the self, and when people share these results on Instagram it also influences their followers (friends) to also define fitness by quantifying the self; and buy these products in order to do so.
1. Chung, Chia-Fang, et al. “When Personal Tracking Becomes Social.” Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2017, doi:10.1145/3025453.3025747.
2. Clinton Stark. “Peloton Rolls out Instagram Stories Sharing Feature.” Stark Insider, 13 Dec. 2020, www.starkinsider.com/2020/09/peloton-rolls-out-instagram-sharing-feature.html
3. Trace, Ciaran, and Yan Zhang. “The Quantified-Self Archive: Documenting Lives through Self-4. Tracking Data.” Journal of Documentation, vol. 76, no. 1, 2019, pp. 290–316., doi:10.1108/jd-04-2019-0064.
5. Vaidhyanathan, Siva. “The Attention Machine” from Anti-Social Media, 2018, pp. 77-105.