July 9, 2022 • 09:20 - 09:30 | Saturday
Parallel 3 - Zhumu Conference: 614369889 : Zhumu Conference: 614369889
Parallel 3: Metaverse and AI for a better post-COVID world

The COVID-19 pandemic impairs people’s social connections. Lockdown, quarantine, and self-isolation have led to severe mental health problems, antisocial behaviors, and suicides, reminding people of the importance of community relationships. Fortunately, mobile fitness technology, such as running trackers, smartwatches, and fitness apps, facilitates mediated communities for strangers to connect and acquaintances to socialize via exercises. Exercising with communities generates significant health benefits than exercising alone. There has been a 50% increase in fitness app downloads globally during the pandemic. This number indicates the great potential of these mediated communities on people’s mental health. 

 

How to engage the public has always been a challenge for community relationships. Little research has explored fitness technology-mediated communities from a public relations perspective. The existing research on fitness apps focuses on obesity and fitness apps, apps’ clinical and sports utility, and user perceptions. A recent review reports that medicine, computer science, and health sciences are the three major fields that research fitness apps, and most of the data came from the United States. A public relations perspective is in need because community relationship has always been a critical function of public relations practice and an essential area in its research. User experience outside the U.S. also provides new insights. 

 

Crowdsourcing refers to a massive number of people replying to open calls from shared networks to complete tasks or share ideas. As crowdsourcing has become a common public relations strategy, the current study applies Relationship Management Theory (RMT) from the public relations literature to examine crowdsourcing communities facilitated by mobile fitness technology. Statistically, young women have become the major fitness technology users. Thirty-two one-on-one interviews were conducted with young Chinese female participants who used fitness trackers, smartwatches, or fitness apps. 

 

This study reports three types of technology-mediated crowdsourcing communities, including a. socially responsible communities in which members responded to open calls from the fitness technology companies to exchange their walking steps for real trees to be planted in the desert, b, exercise-together communities facilitated by artificial intelligence suggesting the best jogging route in users’ neighborhoods based on many other users’ recommendations, and c. online communities of user-generated content where users posted their exercise experiences, pictures, and tips and obtained emotional support. 

 

These communities generated relationship outcomes such as a positive impression of fitness technology companies, commitment to continued usage of the fitness technology, and involvement in exercise behaviors. Participants’ motivation to complete exercise tasks together or share their exercise experiences online included assigning noble social meaning to their mundane exercises (e.g., fighting against the climate change), social recognition, getting to know new people with common interests, obtaining non-judgemental support from strangers, establishing one’s micro fan communities, and placing trust in community members. Barriers for public engagement in these communities were found to be rejections to fitness technology’s social functions, privacy concerns for potential stalking and parental interferences, and negative perceptions of sharing incentives in these communities. 


The theoretical contributions of this study lie in its application of RMT in user experiences of mobile fitness technology. Based on the findings, this study proposes a new model of RMT with revised theoretical outcomes in this context. 



Authors
  • Sumin Fang

    University of the Fraser Valley

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