Re-thinking Leisure in a Digital Age by Silk, Michael; Millington, Brad; Rich, Emma;

Short description:

This book makes the study of digital cultures central to understanding contemporary leisure practices, experiences, institutions and subjectivities and the place of (digitised) leisure in understandings of embodiment, power relations, social inequalities, social structures and social institutions. The chapters originally published in a special issue in Leisure Studies.

Long description:

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.

"Collectively, the contributions in this anthology provide refreshing new insights and perspectives on the digital shift that international leisure studies are confronted with. The topics addressed here will be important to examine in other sports-related scholarly fields in the coming years. The individual chapters in the book are far-sighted, creative and valuable contributions to the advancement of sport and leisure as academic fields."

- Anne Tjønndal, Nordic Sport Science Forum

Table of Contents:

Foreword: lively devices, lively data and lively leisure studies Deborah Lupton  1. (Re-)thinking digital leisure Michael Silk, Brad Millington, Emma Rich and Anthony Bush  2. Young people, digital media making and critical digital citizenship D. McGillivray, G. McPherson, J. Jones and A. McCandlish  3. Video games and the political and cultural economies of health-entertainment Brad Millington  4. Exploring online fitness culture and young females Stephanie T. Jong and Murray J. N. Drummond  5. Be who you are and be proud: Brittney Griner, intersectional invisibility and digital possibilities for lesbian sporting celebrity Megan Chawansky  6. Towards typologies of virtual maltreatment: sport, digital cultures & dark leisure Emma Kavanagh, Ian Jones and Lucy Sheppard-Marks  7. (Re)constructing the tourist experience? Editing experience and mediating memories of learning to dive Stephanie Merchant  8. Immaterial labour in spaces of leisure: producing biopolitical subjectivities through Facebook Jeff Rose and Callie Spencer  Afterword: a new digital Leisure Studies for Theoretical Times Steve Redhead