From Body Hacking to Body Activism: Redefining Bodies in Digital Media
Digital media has dramatically changed our understanding, knowledge, and experience of bodies. Body tracking apps and smart watches allow for new and intense practices of self-surveillance; social media platforms such as Insta and Tiktok present the constant work of body optimization as reasonable and desirable; selfie culture commonly serves to demonstrate willing compliance with new unachievable beauty standards. Filters, editing, lighting, and angling suggest that everybody can be brought into normative shape. Bodies are highly commodified when influencers link their accounts to LTK or amazon storefronts where products are being sold that suggest that youth, fitness, health, thinness, and beauty can be bought.