 Well, hi, my name is Joep. I'm a PhD student here at Aarhus University. I have an educational background within media studies and currently I'm at the end of my first year of my PhD studies. In my PhD project I look at the intersection of media and exercise from a user perspective. And today I want to talk about some of my initial findings from my first empirical work. I'm going to talk about practices of people using media and technology to cope with unpleasant exercise experiences. And what I'm presenting here is sort of work in progress, so I consider this a great chance to get some valuable feedback. I hope to spend most of the time talking about my empirical findings, but I sort of feel the need just to say a few words about mediatization, because that is what has inspired me to do this project. I'll also very briefly talk about my data collection before I move to my analysis. My analysis is in two parts. First I'll talk about two diverging experiences of exercise practice. Enjoying exercise and hating exercise. Then I'll talk about how those who hate exercise use media and technology to cope with this situation in which they find unpleasant. So, mediatization. My PhD project is inspired by a current discussion within media studies about the mediatization of society. As the quote on my slide indicates, mediatization takes its point of departure in a new situation in which culture has become inseparable from media. So it says, media are no longer outside society, exerting a specific influence or effect on culture and therefore on individuals. In our present media saturated society, media are inside society, part of the fabric of culture. They become the cultural air we breathe. According to Sonia Livingstone, a media scholar, this sort of interweaving between media and culture is the result of a widespread digitization of society. Today all elements of society, speech, faces, nature, photos and so on, are to be found in digital versions on our screens and on our devices. Exercise is one of those mediatized fields. Selfies of fit and unfit bodies are shared on social networks. Virtual exercise clubs emerge with Facebook as their primary way of organizing and communicating. For example, I've included this Facebook cover photo from a Facebook group called the Unofficial Zombies Run Weight Loss Group. These people use a certain smartphone app to lose weight and in this group they discuss about their experiences relating to this zombie universe. And finally, recreational athletes are using smartphone apps such as Armando and Strava. However, mediatization is not only a question of face-to-face communication being supplemented or replaced by mediated forms of communication. From a mediatization perspective, media have become influential and important, and I quote, in the muddy realities of different social fields, as Andreas Hips, DR at Knut Lundby write an introduction to a special issue of the communications journal. So I ask myself, how do media become important in the muddy realities of exercise? Today smartphones and variables are equipped with mobile sensors that make it possible for recreational athletes to measure their exercise activity and turn it into data such as running distance, time and running route, calories burn and so on. And smartphone apps like Armando and Strava, they map and display these data to the individual in an orderly fashion, as you can see on these screen charts. And the individual's virtual network can like and comment on these data that are uploaded to the platform. There's been a call for research that specifically sheds light on how people make use of self-tracking in their everyday lives. And my research is a response to that call. I research what people do with media in the context of physical activity. So I'm asking questions like, what do people do with their devices and media content while they're running and how do they make use of their exercise data. I don't look at self-tracking in isolation because I quickly realized that many recreational athletes, they employ other apps and other kinds of media content while they're running, some listen to Spotify playlists, others like to hear podcasts, other use training programs like the 5K Run app and some even use two or three tracking devices at a time. So I did my first data collection together with two other scholars from Olms and Copenhagen. And they were also, luckily they were also interested in some of the same things that I was interested in. So we kind of made a fairly exploratory research design. We sampled six men and six women. Some were experienced recreational athletes while others were newcomers to exercise. But they all shared, what they all shared was that they used at least one kind of tracking device. So we observed their activity on the tracking platform for a month. And then afterwards we interviewed them. We quickly realized that there was not much activity going on in terms of communication directly on the platforms apart from a few lights and comments here and there. We interviewed them about their exercise history, their former experience with monitoring of exercise their concrete usage of media and technology while they were running or biking or what they were doing and then about their sharing practices on Facebook and Twitter and stuff. Within qualitative research in fiscal activity there has been a turn. Scholars have begun to write academic articles in which they use themselves as part of the empirical data or as the only empirical data. They use the data to write compelling and vivid and evocative stories about fiscal activity. The reason for doing so is that the scholars think that this form of evocative writing better represents the movement they are trying to write about when they compare to traditional academic texts. So simultaneously with this interview process I've been making data on my own media use in relation to exercise. And I've done so by recording my spontaneous thoughts in a voice recorder app on my smartphone. Also taking screenshots of app interfaces, pictures and written small notes, never note. And so far I haven't used these data for anything yet. But I'm telling you this today because it sort of had an unexpected outcome this process of experimentation. In the voice recordings I talk quite a lot about how I myself sometimes struggling with exercise and how my media use helped me in this situation. How it intervenes. And I discovered that some of the things that I felt and used media for were also present in the interview data. So this process of experimentation made me realize what was the story I was going to tell with my data. And it was a story about people using media technology to cope with these unpleasant exercise experiences. So now I'll move to the analysis of my empirical data. I'll mainly use theories from two scholars, Drew Letter and Don Eyde. None of them write specifically about exercise. Drew Letter is a medical doctor in PhD in philosophy. And over the years he has done extensive work on embodiment and pain from a phenomenological point of view. With inspiration from Maloponte, Heidegger and Husserl. And I'll use his theories to talk about different ways of being in the world during exercise. And I'll also use Don Eyde who is American philosopher of science and technology to reflect on the human technology relation. So what the informants all have in common is that they want to exercise. They do so for a lot of different reasons. I don't have time to go through now. However, while they all want to exercise, they can roughly be divided into two groups who react very differently to the exercise experience. Some of the informants enjoy exercise. And I've made this model showing how the informants experience their bodies and the ways of being in the world during physical activity. And this model is made as a continuum. The informants can move left or right on the model in accordance with how great or how little the physical exertion is. If the informants are running slowly or warming up their legs, they are more likely to be experiencing ecstatic embodiment on the left. If the informants are doing high intensity interval training, you'll be more likely to experience intense embodiment. However, the point with the model is not so much to link a specific exercise phase, a way of exercising to a specific way of being in the body. The model is supposed to show that the recreational athletes who enjoy exercise keep a positively bodily experience no matter how exhausting the physical activity gets. I only have time to explain the ecstatic embodiment and the intensive embodiment, so I must save them one in the middle for another time. At the one end of the continuum are times in which the informants are aware of their surroundings. In the interviews, the informants are especially fond of the nature. For example, Helis says, I would never run here in the city. I always go into the woods, to the beach or down to the barband lake. It's just that I enjoy. Well, one of the reasons that I run is it is simply because I enjoy to get out to go see nature. When in this state of ecstatic embodiment, the surface of the body, our hands, our eyes, our noses and so on are used as the instrument we sense from and act with, the informants use their eyes to see the nature and their legs to run and bike. However, from an experiential point of view, the body has disappeared as stated by a true letter. Insofar as I perceive through an organ, it necessarily recedes from the perceptual field it discloses. What does that mean? Tice, the participant, he sees the sun while he's out biking, but he doesn't see his own eyes. The participant, Helis hears the sounds of the forest, but she doesn't hear her own ears. In this way, the goal of the activity to experience nature is the object of attention rather than the body itself. At the other end of the continuum are times at which the informants have strong positive bodily experience during exercise. These can be categorized as experiences of intensive embodiment as exercise researchers Jacqueline Alain Collison and Helen Ohton call intensive embodiment. In an auto-ethnographic study of the experience of heat during running and boxing, they define intensive embodiment as a positively heightened sense of corporeal aliveness of the senses working at an intense level. They're kind of bodily high, richly described by Schilling and Bunsell in portraying the workout experience of female bodybuilders where pleasure and pain, boundaries blur and muscles work to the max. The informants or the participants also experience these feelings of intensive embodiment. Mass laugh while he is telling about how he puked the first time he went trail running in a mountain bike trail in a forest. The trail, and I quote, punished him real bad as he told me. In an energetic voice, the 26-year-old Tice also told me about how he and his friends are riding on their mountain bikes so fast that their tongues and lungs are hanging out of their mouths. And these are just a few examples. While the body is absent during times of ecstatic embodiment, the body is very much the center of attention in the times of intensive embodiment, but in a positive way as the examples show. And what one can say is that they have sort of learned to enjoy this experience of pain and the body working hard because they have sort of become used to this physical activity. So to sum up, the informants who enjoy exercise work their way in and out out of three positive kinds of embodiment during exercise. For those who hate exercise, there is no continuum of positive embodiment. Instead, every single runs feel as though they are constantly on the verge of dying as one of the informants put it. Amanda, she says, I'm going to die, I'm going to die, I'm going to die stage every step of the way. And she says so in a very frustrated tone of voice. As soon as this informant starts to exercise, they start to feel physical and or emotional pain. Take for instance Sine. She's not been able to start running on a regular basis even though she wants to. She hurt her ankle once and since that injury, every time she tries to run, she experiences what drew later cause an experiential paradox regarding the sensation and interpretation of pain. She thinks she senses some kind of pain in her legs when she begins to run. But how bad is it really? Is this her body giving her sign of a new ankle injury in the making? Or is it just her mind playing tricks on her while pushing her body to get fitter? She doesn't know if this pain is a good or bad sign. Is she actually provoking pain by focusing on pain? Who knows? She doesn't know if this pain is good or bad. She becomes very afraid of the slightest feeling of pain in her body. When so focusing some option pain, she doesn't have the attention needed to control her run in terms of how fast, slower, how long she is going to exercise. This sets off an inner voice telling her that what she is doing is all wrong, that she is useless at exercising. All of this contributes to an inner feeling of having a wrong exercise experience because she compares herself to what she calls running freaks, that is people who enjoy exercise. What is happening to Sine and the other exercising informants during physical activity is that they are sent into a sort of a spiral of physical and or emotional pain in which gradually, and I quote, the body itself becomes what we feel, the center or axis of thematic attention as through letter rights. And this spiral, it imposes a spatio-temporal constriction on the informants. Spatially, the informants experience the here of pain in their bodies instead of sort of ecstatically being out there, for example, experiencing nature and their surroundings like the forest. Temporally, the informants are forced to the now of the pain as when Sine is concerned with the experience of pain now and what she's going to do in a minute in terms of controlling and managing her run. From this follows italic demand, as through letter calls it, which is to be free of pain, of course. And since this kind of pain is self-induced by exercising, the informants have the option of just quitting. They stop running because it's so unpleasant that they can't overcome it. That is what this group of exercise-hating people have done up until now, until they began to use media and technology. And I'll now focus on the way in which the informants who hate exercise use media and technology. I'm thinking about using calibration as an overall metaphor to describe the ways in which these people are using media and technology. Roughly put, to calibrate something is to use one instrument to check, adjust or make sure that another instrument is working the way it's supposed to work or how you would like it to work. In this case, the informants use media and technology to calibrate their bodily experiences of exercise. The first practice is coping with the spiral of physical and emotional pain I just described. Here, media and technology plays an active part during exercise. According to Drude Letter, one way to escape pain is to turn our attention somewhere else like watching television or listening to music. Some of the informants seek a sensory distraction by listening to music or podcasts while running. Amanda, for example, talks about how she uses sound books to distract her away from feelings of dying. If you're listening to a great murder mystery, then you're not thinking about it. That is, the pain in raising thoughts, then the legs are just working. And if you use the night as different ways of categorizing the human-technology relation I would argue that this could be named an embodiment relation. In an embodiment relation, the human use technology as an extension of their senses. For example, when looking at the moon through a telescope. Embodiment relations simultaneously magnify or amplify as well as reduce or place aside what is experienced through their technology. In this case, Amanda amplifies her hearing in the sense that she listens to a murder mystery told and recorded at another place and time. At the same time as distracting her thoughts, the audio input also reduces her ability to hear her own breathing. She doesn't like to listen to her own breathing because she feels that something is wrong with her body when she starts to pant because the exercise gets hard. So media is simultaneously used as a distraction by amplifying certain audio inputs and by reducing certain audio inputs. Instead of being caught up in the spiral, music also helps the informants or the participants to feel through their bodies in a sort of ecstatic sense. For example, Sr. talks about how she uses the beat of the music to feel present in the world. The beat of the music helps her to feel her feet hit the ground instead of focusing on raising thoughts about whether or not she is in pain. The exercise-hating informants typically don't want to exercise with other people. They do sometimes participate in small-scale running events, but in general, they don't want to run by themselves. They don't want to run with anyone because they feel embarrassed about their bodies because exercising with others tends to trigger feelings of being bad at exercising and because they don't have the mental energy to focus on anything other than themselves. In this case, using a tracking device creates anonymity in the sense of not being judged by other people during exercise, but it still creates a feeling of being watched over as if there was another person present. Camilla stated like this, I think it was a pleasant feeling that there was something following me all the way around instead of a route I had mapped at home. So in addition to having a practical function to keep track of the distance of her run, the tracking also gets an emotional function, a feeling that something is keeping an eye on her in a good way. So here, tracking provides some sort of comfortable companionship that helps informant to endure the physical activity. Everything is going to be alright because I'm not alone. Daughter, a 29-year-old female, even labels her smartphone as her training partner. She uses free activity trackers at the same time, even though they provide her with the same kind of data. So here the human-tech relation can be categorized as what Don Aide calls an alterative relation because the smartphone is seen as another being. I'm going to skip the last one and go to the next slide. Another practice is validating and reevaluating the bodily experience of their runs. Don Aide writes about a hypnotic relationship between human and technology. He uses the thermometer as an illustration of this relation. We look at the thermometer and we instantly know how to dress before going outside. In a literal sense, we read the numbers on the thermometer in Celsius and Fahrenheit, but we immediately link these numbers to whether it's hot or cold. Thus we interpret the world through the numbers on the thermometer. This human-tech relation is also present in the way some of the informants use tracking data. Take for instance, again, Amanda, she says, when starting to run I looked quite a lot at my heart rate because I was feeling I was going to die. It was also to see if the heart rate was getting better because if I then get home and think I don't really think the feeling of doing exercise was that bad today, then I'll open the app to see if I'm right. What Amanda does here is that she compares the measurements on her heart rate to her bodily experience of exercise. And as belonging to the group of exercise-hating people, she distrusts her body. Instead, a great deal of trust is placed in the device as an instrument to get at a real, objective sort of experience of what is happening during exercise. She looks at her pulse, and while it is probably high, she uses the numbers to conclude that she is not going to die, even though she feels like it. She uses the numbers to reevaluate her bodily experience. And in the last part of the quote, she talks about checking if a run actually wasn't that hard. In this instance, she uses the numbers to see if she can validate her bodily experience. The last practice I'm going to talk about is about convincing themselves that they can exercise. When reading through the transcripts and analyzing the data, it became clear to me that even though I had an open mind, I still sort of expected these people to do careful data analysis of their tracking data, but they didn't. At first, it seemed a bit weird that they weren't making any data analysis because they told me that they claimed that data are very important to them. They want accurate measurements. They favor tracking devices that give them detailed tracking data over devices with less detailed tracking options. And they care about getting as much tracked as possible. For example, one participant uses an app to guide her through her app training of the abdominal muscles. And at the same time, she uses Endomondo. And if you think about it, the only data she gets out of tracking this app session with Endomondo is the duration of the session. And she already knew that from the app she was using. So what does she get out of this? She cannot use distance kilometers per hour or route for anything. It's pretty worthless because she is lying on the floor. So it doesn't track anything. So I became curious as to how these data become meaningful to the informants. Because they struggle so much with exercise, they have a hard time believing they can actually run and be runners. So the runs that they actually complete are of great value to them. And every exercise tracking app that I've stumbled upon has this feature of showing the person's history of exercise. And this history can be seen as a very basic narrative of their physical activity. And what the informants do is that they casually browse through these achievements in their everyday lives when they are waiting for the bus, when they are sitting in a couch at night, and when they are making dinner and so on. So they are actually sort of hanging out with the data fight exercise cells. They do so because they use tracking data to convince themselves that they can actually run. One of the informants put it this way when asked about the most important feature. To be able to check history that you can go back and see that despite all I've managed to keep running that I haven't just done it and then it was over. And you can see something similar in the quote below by Cine. I think it also makes sense to characterize this as a relationship as a hermeneutic one. The data is produced in times at which the informants are busy with hating exercise and coping with this situation. But when they look at these data afterwards, when they are not affected by a negative bodily experience and raising thoughts they can start to believe that they are actually able to exercise. It matters that the data are there and the more detailed the better because it gives them a stronger sense of an exercise self. But it matters less what the data actually show. Thank you.