Making sense of digital technologies: A sociocultural perspective from sport pedagogy

Abstract

Digitalization in sports is often discussed in terms of opportunities or risks associated with particular technologies. From a sociocultural perspective, however, digital technologies appear as profoundly ambivalent artefacts whose significance cannot be determined solely by assessing their functionality or classifying their effects. Instead, technologies are embedded in ongoing processes through which people make sense of themselves, others, and the world, while negotiating normative understandings of bodies, health, ability, or participation in sports.

Drawing on studies of health- and fitness-related social media content on Instagram (Höger, 2024) and digital assistive technologies (DATs) for blind and visually impaired (BVI) students in physical education (Höger et al., submitted; Höger & Meier, 2025; Meier et al., 2023), this keynote examines two interrelated dimensions of these processes. First, it explores how hegemonic understandings of bodies, health, and ability become embedded in digital representations, technological imaginaries, and material arrangements. On Instagram, young, slim, fit, and non-disabled bodies function as implicit standards against which other bodies are classified as desirable, normal, or in need of intervention. Fitness thereby becomes closely associated with discipline, responsibility, and self-management. In ball games involving BVI students, standardized rules, spatial arrangements, and sporting materials similarly establish apparently self-evident prerequisites for legitimate participation. DATs do not necessarily unsettle these requirements, but instead relocate the responsibility for fulfilling them from bodies to technologies imagined as adaptive, anticipatory, and infallible.

Second, the keynote demonstrates that young people do not simply adopt these meanings. They negotiate, appropriate, and sometimes resist them in situated and embodied ways. Their engagements with social media images reveal ambivalent positionings between critical distance from normative body ideals and their continuing affective appeal. Likewise, the meanings assigned to DATs shift across different situations of play. What enables participation in one situation may become distracting, restrictive, or dangerous in another.

Meanings and effects, therefore, do not reside intrinsically in technologies but emerge within sociocultural and material–discursive configurations. Building on this argument, the keynote asks how we can move beyond functionalist as well as technologically optimistic or pessimistic perspectives. It discusses how critical-reflexive educational processes might enable us to examine the norms embodied in digital technologies, reflect on their unequal and situated implications, and imagine alternative relations between technologies, bodies, and participation.

References

Höger, B. (2024). #fitspiration: Körperideale und -devianzen in sportbezogenen sozialen Medien. In T. Bindel, F. Ott, H. Rudi, & C. Theis (Eds.), Schulsport in der Jugendphase (pp. 357–375). Meyer & Meyer Verlag.

Höger, B., & Meier, S. (2025). Exploring Marginalized Perspectives: Participatory Research in Physical Education With Students With Blindness and Visual Impairment. Journal of Teaching in Physical Education, 44(4), 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1123/jtpe.2023-0325

Höger, B., Sandbichler, B., Weiß, K., Giese, M., & Meier, S. (submitted). “Stay on the ball”: Negotiating meanings of digital assistive technologies in Physical Education. Adapted Physical Activity Quarterly.

Meier, S., Höger, B., & Giese, M. (2023). “If only balls could talk…”: Barriers and opportunities to participation for students with blindness and visual impairment in specialized PE. Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, 5, 1286909. https://doi.org/10.3389/fspor.2023.1286909