On the Slope Is on the Screen

Abstract

Internet-based social media have emerged as an important site for creative consumption, or prosumption, and a number of studies have examined how consumers interact in and shape this virtual space. However, less is known about how social media transform consumers’ bodily practices beyond the realm of the Internet itself. Thus we might ask, If consumers embrace participatory web cultures, how does the web participate in (offline) consumer cultures? This article analyzes the significance of social media for a range of bodily subcultural practices. Using ethnographic data from freeskiing, a lifestyle sport similar to snowboarding, it details how social media converts “offline” forms of prosumption into mediatized and globally embedded practices. It argues that important subcultural practices, such as self-observation, learning, and developing a sense of style, all depend on habitual practices of seeing and that these offline practices change as the production and consumption of visual social media becomes more widespread. The article suggests that social media institute the global coordination of individual aesthetic practices that include hedonism, reflection, and knowledge. It concludes that social media can be conceptualized as scopic systems: decentralized, nonhierarchical mechanisms that select, distribute, and contextualize visual content and foster global microstructures among dispersed audiences. In developing this argument, the article specifies the impact of social media on prosumption on the basis of insights from science and technology studies.