The development of online participatory cultures: from baseball analytics to covid conspiracy

ABSTRACTThis paper explores online participatory culture from the early 1990s to the present, highlighting three trends that exemplify its development and eventual co-option by corporate and political movements. In the 1990s, a participatory culture around baseball analytics emerged online, characterized by a challenge to traditional notions of knowledge in the sport. By the 2000s, online participatory cultures began populating social media platforms that were searching for new ways to increase user engagement. One such culture, the self-tracking fitness movement, focused on individual self-improvement via quantifying the body’s activity, while promoting a relocation of expert knowledge to the online technology and fitness platforms that housed the movement. During the COVID-19 pandemic, notions of expert knowledge and individualized approaches to the body, aspects of the first two trends, were manipulated by far-right rhetoric and transformed by mis- and disinformation disseminated on the now-ubiquitous social media platforms. The study concludes by analyzing philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s condemnation of COVID-19 public health mandates, exploring how the theories underlying both baseball analytics and self-tracking were used to valorize individualistic health freedom over collective well-being. Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).