A Study Of The Productive Practices Of Online Fitness Users And Their Internal Logic In The Context Of Digital Labour ——The Keep App As An Example

The advent of the Internet era has introduced humanity to the era of digital capitalism.The outbreak of the New Coronary Pneumonia epidemic has given online fitness a fuller scope for development,and the academic debate on fitness for all has gradually become an important research topic in recent years.From the results of current academic research,few studies have explored the topic of fitness under the perspective of digital labour theory,and theoretical studies on digital labour have been lacking in the care of the field of sports and fitness.However,due to the proliferation of online fitness users and the increase in social activity on fitness platforms,we need to further explore the digital labour of online fitness users,and the combination of the two is both a new path for digital labour research and an attempt to provide new theoretical support for exploring online fitness issues.To better cut through the research on online fitness users’ digital labour,the popular fitness platform Keep App was selected as a case study for analysis in this paper.Using case study analysis,online observation and semi-structured interviews,the logic of capital accumulation of the fitness platform is analysed,and attempts are made to discover and discuss the intrinsic motivations of users’ active participation in digital labour.The study found that online fitness platforms accumulate capital by ’commoditising’ the information content,labour time,social behaviour and emotional labour of fitness users.However,the majority of fitness users do not have a clear understanding of the digital labour they are performing,believing that there is an ’equivalence’ between their productive practices and access to the services provided by the platform,and that the surplus value is often seen as a’worthless,negligible production’.The surplus value is often seen by users as a "value-free and negligible production",and is thus reduced to the "playwork" of the platform’s labour.The triple logic of culture,technology and emotion provides a glimpse into the social and psychological influences that motivate fitness users to ’actively accept exploitation’,which is the focus of this paper.Under the cultural logic,the rise of the online fitness trend and the bodily perceptions and training generated by the dual "surveillance" of data and users can influence users to continuously reinforce their personal behaviour of using the platform for fitness.In the emotional logic,the recognition of the platform’s values,the pursuit of social rituals,the sense of value and belonging that one obtains in the process of production practices engaged in by the platform,and the expectation of realising the value,deepen the dependence of fitness users on the platform from an emotional dimension.Faced with the deep exploitation of users by platform capital,this paper proposes an imaginary resistance to digital labour: by promoting the implementation of policies,creating an information environment and optimising the platform mechanism,users are led out of the "exploitation envelope",and at the same time,it advocates guiding theory with practice and echoing various theories to collaboratively promote theoretical research on digital labour.It also advocates the development of innovation in digital labour theory by guiding theory with practicality and echoing multiple theories.