Re-thinking Leisure in a Digital Age

Digital worlds and cultures―social media, web 2.0, youtube, wearable technologies, health and fitness apps―dominate, if not order, our everyday lives. We are no longer ‘just’ consumers or readers of digital culture but active producers through facebook, twitter, Instagram, youtube and other emerging technologies. This book is predicated on the assumption that out understanding of our everyday lives should be informed by what is taking place in and through emerging technologies given these (virtual) environments provide a crucial context where traditional, categorical assumptions about the body, identity and leisure may be contested. Far from being ‘virtual’, the body is constituted within and through emerging technologies in material ways. Recent ‘moral panics’ over the role of digital cultures in teen suicide, digital drinking games, an endless array of homoerotic images of young bodies being linked with steroid use, disordered eating and body dissatisfaction, facebook games/fundraising campaigns (e.g. for breast cancer), movements devoted to exposing ‘everyday sexism’ / metoo, twitter abuse (of feminists, of athletes, of racist nature to name but a few), speak to the need for critical engagement with digital cultures. While some of the earlier techno-utopian visions offered the promise of digitality to give rise to participatory, user generator collaborations, within this book we provide critical engagement with digital technologies and what this means for our understandings of leisure cultures.

The chapters originally published in a special issue in Leisure Studies.

Michael Silk is a Professor and Deputy Dean (Research & Professional Practice) in the Faculty of Management. His research and scholarship is interdisciplinary and focuses on the relationships between sport & physical activity (physical culture), the governance of bodies, mediated (sporting) spectacles, identities and urban spaces.

Brad Millington is a Lecturer in the Department for Health at the Univesity of Bath. His research is focussed on how technology has helped shape sporting practices in different historical eras, in sport and physical activity policy, and in the meanings people ascribe to their sport and physical activity experiences.

Emma Rich is a Reader in the Department for Health at the University of Bath. Her research examines sport, physical activity and physical/health education with a specific interest in digital health technologies (e.g. mobile and digital health, big data, wearable technologies).

Anthony Bush is a Senior Lecturer in the Department for Health at the University of Bath. He is an interdisciplinary scholar specialising on issues concerning the physically active body in a myriad of spaces and sites including, but not limited to, the elite sporting context.