ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the question of how people actually engage with fitness technologies. The theme that cuts across the different sections of the analysis presented herein is that technology consumerism is a negotiated matter, which is to say that people make use of technologies in active and perhaps unexpected ways. This is a theme, for example, found in research on exergaming. Gamers must deploy both media and physical literacies in order to use games like Wii Bowling successfully. The process of negotiating consumerism is relevant to technology-enabled self-tracking as well, most of all as people ‘become with’ data by filtering ostensibly objective data through the lens of subjective experience. Social media platforms are negotiated too – for example, as people actively create and contest meaning around issues such as obesity on platforms like Twitter. The final section of the chapter considers how the idea that consumerism is actively negotiated – while perhaps taken as vindication of the empowerment mantra suffused throughout fitness-technology marketing – reveals fault lines the notion of empowerment-through-consumerism as well.
