Discipline and distinction in the age of the Internet: a sociological study of the fitness practice

The paper situates contemporary fitness in China within a historical trajectory from state-led, politically imprinted sport to market-guided, individualized fitness practices. With the rise of mobile Internet and apps such as Keep, fitness has moved from supervised gyms into everyday private spaces, accompanied by growing enthusiasm and personal investment. The authors pose three core research questions: (1) In the context of rapid technological change and the decline of traditional supervised teaching, does a discipline mechanism still operate in fitness practice, and how has it changed? (2) Can the strong motivation and sustained commitment to fitness be explained by internal self-discipline, and if so, what kind? (3) Has mobile Internet technology in the information age fostered a new configuration of power distribution? The study uses Keep as a focal case to explore these issues.

The background traces fitness’s early 20th-century introduction into China, its political inflection through much of the 20th century, and its reemergence post-1980s amid marketization and consumer culture. The review highlights sociology’s 'body turn' since the 1980s and Foucault’s concept of disciplinary power producing 'docile bodies' via spatial organization, time-tabling, and surveillance. In sport, research alternately emphasizes sport as a paradigmatic disciplinary apparatus or critiques biomedicalized training norms as alienating. Prior studies of gyms in China similarly find Foucauldian mechanisms (closed spaces, schedules, supervision). However, with fitness dispersing into everyday spaces and mediated by apps, the authors question whether these mechanisms persist or transform. They also note that existing work often focuses on gender discipline or media-driven ideals, leaving underexamined the general mechanisms of fitness discipline and the internal motivational dynamics of practitioners. Additional perspectives include consumer society (Baudrillard), the health/beauty imperatives, gendered motivations, and fitness as a postmodern cultural practice blurring self/body and public/private distinctions. Gaps identified: overbroad conflation of fitness with sport, emphasis on gender at the expense of general disciplinary mechanisms, and insufficient explanation of why fitness stands out among many routes to health/beauty.

The study employs a theory-driven sociological analysis combining: (1) A conceptual framework integrating Foucault’s discipline (space, time, surveillance/knowledge), Elias’s civilizing process and emotions (shame, other-orientation, status anxiety), and Baudrillard’s consumer society (codes, distinction). (2) A case study of the Chinese fitness app Keep, examining its design and functions (courses, movement repertoires, grading, timing, rest guidance, dietary guidelines, community, LBS features, and commerce) to identify disciplinary strategies. (3) Use of secondary data from Keep’s official reports (e.g., user scale, venue choices) and industry reports to contextualize usage patterns. (4) A qualitative content analysis of user-generated content on Keep’s community: 200 popular updates were collected by refreshing the popular section at 8:00 p.m. daily from July 22 to August 10, 2018; after removing duplicates and off-topic posts, 191 valid updates remained. These were categorized into self-encouragement, reflection, process records, knowledge/experience sharing, and user-produced teaching videos. Forty-one were videos. Forty-five updates were knowledge/experience sharing (including supplementary instructions, Q&A for novices, explanations of fitness knowledge, and personal reviews), illustrating practitioner participation in knowledge reproduction. Examples of analyzed content include diet strategies (e.g., 'cheat meal'), technique tips (push-ups, ab wheel), evaluations of equipment (sweat suits), and reflections on routines/time use.

- External disciplinary strategies have been upgraded in the app-mediated context: • Spatial strategy: Liquidity and visibility. Keep’s LBS and mobile affordances extend fitness from closed gyms into bedrooms, offices, parks; surveillance shifts from panopticon to omnipticon/synopticon via community feeds and expert pages, rendering everyday spaces transparent to watching/being watched. • Time strategy: Linearization, rhythmization, and fragmentation. Courses are serialized with graded difficulty and standardized durations, aligning with industrial time. Rest/warm-up/recovery are prescribed to maintain productivity; micro-sessions (e.g., 2–4 minute workouts) colonize fragmented time, eroding unscheduled leisure. • Knowledge strategy: Centralization and scientization. Keep aggregates and operationalizes scientific discourse (course functions, contraindications, physiological responses, caloric data) and extends to diets, tests, and a mall, offering structured choices that individualize within expert-defined classifications. - Positive self-discipline mechanisms drive persistent engagement and social distinction: • Code manipulation: Practitioners differentiate through consumption of functional and aesthetic codes (health/beauty aims; movement/dietary taxonomies; gear types), locating themselves within hierarchies of symbols under the legitimizing discourse of health. • Time consumption: Fitness expends 'time currency' that is relatively democratic and non-substitutable by money; early 'gain periods' and later 'plateaus' naturalize meritocratic ideals (work equals results), aligning with middle-class strategies for distinction. • Moral display: Values like self-discipline, perseverance, independence, simplicity, and 'naturalness' are promoted via app slogans and user posts, functioning as moral capital distinguishing practitioners from non-practitioners. • Self-writing: Through community posts/diaries, users externalize reflections, codify habits, and co-produce knowledge, deepening internalization and extending surveillance from body to soul. - Empirical/contextual data points: • Keep reports completing five funding rounds within 2 years 7 months of launch (Feb 4, 2015), reaching ~100 million registered users and ~30 million MAUs. • Keep’s 2017 survey (n>130,000): <10% use gyms; 64.4% exercise at home/dorms; 13.9% in parks/playgrounds; 12% 'anytime anywhere'. • User content sample: 191 valid updates (collected over ~20 days), including 41 videos; 45 were knowledge/experience sharing. - Macro implication: Internet penetration blurs spatiotemporal boundaries of discipline and shifts power from micro-distributions tied to institutions to daily distributions integrated across life domains.

Addressing the research questions: (1) Discipline persists but transforms under mobile Internet mediation. Spatially, fitness disperses from closed gyms into fluid private/public spaces while becoming more visible through mutual surveillance. Temporally, standardized, graded courses and prescribed rest produce linear, rhythmic, and fragmented time regimes that structure daily life. Knowledge centralization via apps intensifies governance through scientized guidance while offering constrained choice. (2) Internal self-discipline is pivotal and differs from Foucault’s panoptic internalization: it is a positive, voluntary practice shaped by consumer codes, moral values, and reflective self-writing. Practitioners invest time as a democratized currency, naturalizing meritocratic narratives and enabling middle-class distinction strategies. (3) Power distribution expands from micro-institutional sites to everyday life via datafied platforms, dissolving boundaries among domains (work, learning, leisure) and embedding surveillance and discipline into routine activities. Significance: The study reframes fitness as a consumption-based disciplinary practice that constructs identity and distinction, enriching sociological understandings of body governance in the Internet age and extending Foucauldian analyses through Elias’s emotional/civilizing lens and Baudrillard’s code/differentiation framework.

The paper demonstrates that app-mediated fitness reconfigures external disciplinary strategies (space/time/knowledge) and fosters a new, positive form of self-discipline characterized by code manipulation, time investment, moral display, and self-writing. While liberating practitioners from gym confines, platforms like Keep intensify standardization and scientization, compressing and structuring time and space. Practitioners leverage fitness as moral and symbolic capital to distinguish themselves, particularly within the middle class, aligning with consumer-society dynamics. Beyond fitness, the Internet era enables power to diffuse from institutional micro-sites into daily life, as datafication and platformization weave surveillance and learning into ordinary routines. The authors suggest further exploration of the field boundaries and generalization of these disciplinary mechanisms across other domains of everyday life in the Internet society.