Young people’s uses of wearable healthy lifestyle technologies: surveillance, self-surveillance and resistance

The purpose of this paper is to suggest and empirically illustrate how social media can be used to generate sustained and in-depth insights into sport and exercise practitioners’ on-going practices. This is achieved by discussing the potential for social media in research designs and presenting an analysis of 6 physical education teachers’ and a researcher’s tweets during a six-year school-based continuous professional development program. Through the use of empirical illustrations we suggest that social media promotes interflections i.e. an on-going deliberation between practitioners and researchers facilitated by social media. The key contribution of this paper is the argument that social media offers researchers the opportunity to capture sustained and in-depth insights into practitioners and their practices and/or to examine longer-term impacts of programs or interventions. The discussions are relevant to a range of practitioners within sport and exercise pedagogy, with teachers and teaching used as a representative example of this broad field.