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Description
The increasing digitalization of society offers a wealth of opportunities for adolescents. But to comprehend the many enabling aspects, it’s important also to recognize the constraining aspects of technology. Sociologically, there is a generation divide between youth as digital natives and older generations as digital immigrants. In recent years, the use of digital technology in relation to training and exercise among young people has developed rapidly, and we are still challenged in terms of understanding their digital training culture. This paper discusses how young people understand the role of social media related to the construction of body image connected to online training culture. The empirical material consists of 28 individual interviews with 14 students (age 13-15) in 2 Danish secondary schools. We draw on Lupton’s conceptualization of the digitized body, self-tracking and presentation of the self on social media. The adolescents of this study all use social media, but they take a quite critical position when it comes to displaying the body online in relation to exercise and training. As such they understand themselves as far more reflected and critical in their use of digital technologies than the older generations give them credit for. The paper contributes to a further understanding of how young people navigate and position themselves on social media when it comes to displaying the sporting body online and how this is part of their body image construction. Hopefully, this can decrease the divide between young people as digital natives and the digital immigrants of older generations.
