Verausgabung auf „Strava“ und mit „Powermeter“: über technologisch vermittelte Selbstbewertung beim Radsport und eine energiesoziologische Perspektive - Österreichische Zeitschrift für Soziologie

Digital technologies transform social practices and pervade the formation of social order in a diffuse form. Platforms become everyday companions and pose fundamental conceptual and methodological challenges to sociology. The article sheds light on the socio-technical configuration of sport and asks how a technological mediation of cycling helps shape (self-)evaluation and informs qualities of intensity in sporting activity. The article is based on autoethnographic research on digitalised road cycling, conducted with different sensor technologies and guided by the digital platform “Strava”, a popular social network for amateur and professional athletes. The article highlights the human and machine dimensions of data practices and takes from the social science research discourse on self-optimisation and self-tracking the desideratum of unfolding the socio-technical mediation and perception of bodily intensity qualities from the practice of cycling itself. Conceptually, the article makes the innovative proposal to turn to the discourse of recent energetic sociology, which argues that sources of energy are interwoven with the social fabric and influence ways of thinking and acting. Using the concept of “expenditure” (George Bataille), the autoethnographic experience of the socio-technique of cycling is discussed and a comparison of different measuring instruments is made, with a focus on the juxtaposition of the heart rate sensor and the “powermeter”, a performance meter. The autoethnography is based on qualitative data analysis and active participation, which is carried out in an ethnographic narration and rendered analytically fruitful. Finally, the paper differentiates between modes of expenditure, elaborates the prominence of the value of energy efficiency, points out some practical shortcomings of this value and outlines the merits of an energy sociological perspective. This raises awareness of the prominence of non-efficient practices in digitalised sport.