A Community Through a Computer Screen

Apart from doing homework, I would say I spend around 90% (rough guess) of my time on the computer reading about fitness and participating in forums and blogs. There are familiar screen names that I talk to from day to day and I can tell you how they lift, what kind of diet they usually eat and whether or not they compete in bodybuilding or lift for the fun of it. Yet, I cannot tell you most of these people's real names and I have no idea what a few of them even look like. Maybe we'd get along in real life, but we could also hate each other; that's how the digital literacy has changed the fitness world. Sure, we still learn things at the gym and talk to the largest lifters and ask how they got so big, but instead of reading muscle books and magazines (which we still do, just not nearly as much) we participate on forums.

Steven Johnson has written extensively on this subject. In his article, "Dawn of the digital natives", he analyzes the decline in reading amongst the youth of the country. The article shows statistics, clearly highlighting a decline in the amount of novels we read, but doesn't account for the reading we do online. This is interesting because, even though there is a decline in the amount of books the youth is reading, test scores on reading have only dropped minimally. This is due to the fact that screen based reading isn't shown on these studies. This article ties into my project because there are over a million people that have bodyspaces on bodybuilding.com and many of them are active on the forums. Activity on the site shows that many also spend hours reading posts and trying to find out as much new information about fitness, exercising, and dieting as they can.

Social networking is huge within the fitness community and Steven Johnson writes about its implications on literacy, as well. In his article, "Yes, People Still Read, but Now It's Social", he highlights the fact that we are reading more with the social networking abilities of the internet and inventions such as the Kindle and the Ipad, yet losing some of our focus with all the multitasking as a positive rather than a negative because it is enabling us to read more than we did when the television was our main source of entertainment. A passage of interest is when Johnson writes that a linear, literary mind threatens to become yesterday's mind with the advances in technology. I think that, for myself, as well as many that actively participate on forums, we spend hours reading and contributing information and consider it a form of entertainment. Spending hours reading theories and ideas of others, I am involved in a very social environment, even thought I am reading and writing.