SHARING DIGITALLY
"When I'm swimming, I'm not thinking about how I'm going to mediate that experience later… I'm just doing it."
The digital has made its way into my findings throughout this research - whether it's checking the temperature on Twitter, the contrast of how participants self-quantify in other areas of their life that are absent at the pond, or feelings about the digitization of access to the space. It's not been possible to silo the digital away into a distinct section in my findings, because the digital is impossible to silo away from the rest of life or divorce from the material world (Evens, 2003). However the pond is a space of no photography, phones discouraged, being present very much part of the experience - in fact, the explicitly analogue environment of the pond was flagged by most participants as one of its unique appeals. On a scale of 1-10, all participants ranked the mediation of the experience through the digital a 5 or below. Most were fairly adamant during our initial conversations that their experiences swimming at the pond were something they did purely for themselves, and they felt little need to share it beyond the in-person community of those who happened to be present in the space itself.
"It's something that I'm doing for myself rather than needing other people to see and other people to kind of provide feedback or validate me.”
But as our conversations went on, it became clear to participants that sharing digitally was something they instinctively did - although on much lower scaled social media platforms. Using Daniel Miller's concept of "scalable sociality" (Miller, Costa & Haynes et al, 2012), my participants limited their digital sharing away from the broadcast media of Instagram stories or Twitter feeds (as a rule), but did share their experiences on limited private social media, such as a Facebook family chat or individual WhatsApp messages to friends.
The only participant who regularly shared their ponds experience on social media posted the temperature board to their Instagram stories during most swims. But the way they described it was less to do with sharing and more to do with personal tracking. They did admit that if pictures were allowed at the pond they would probably take more of them, as well as putting more of the ponds on their 1 second of video a day app - because primarily they use these apps as a record of their life for themselves, rather than to broadcast experiences to their wider circle. Most of my participants had taken sneaky pictures at the pond before, most had been told off for it (“once I was told off by an older woman and now I am the woman that tells people off”) and most did so when they went in the summer with friends - even though all agreed that it was important for the freedom and respectful nature of the space for people to feel like they were not going to be photographed.
"When it got down to like five and four, and I knew I was doing something that not loads of people would or could do if I wanted to show off a little bit more, I quite enjoyed that sensation of putting it online and people messaging me that you're fucking crazy."
Some participants talked about a journey of their attitude to broadcasting their experiences having changed since they started their cold water swimming practice. One spoke of feeling less secure at the beginning so wanted to share more publically, to cement being part of a community. Another spoke of that "smugness" that cold water swimmers share, of feeling part of a group that is doing something that not a lot of people would do and wanting people to know, but how this desire to broadcast the activity publicly faded as time went on.
Multiple participants spoke of the push and pull of their relationship with social media in general as personified by the dilemma to share about the ponds. One spoke of the dichotomy between wanting to keep their private experiences for themselves and not lose some of their magic through sharing, while also worrying that if no one knows about their experience but them, does it lose value? But another (very offline) participant said that their attitude to social media was personified by how they never broadcast their swim: they want to feel that experiences alone, like swimming, are just for themselves, "or that if I've done them with other people that's just part of my relationship with them, and it's special to us."
"A part of me wants to be like, hey, well, look at this crazy thing I'm doing. Part of me wants to just be doing it for me and not feel like I need to promote it. And I definitely flick between those two bands all the time."
However participants universally digitally shared their experience of their swim with people they cared about. One would send a selfie to their family group chat most swims.
Another would text a fellow cold water swimmer, sometimes with detail of the temperature and weather, sometimes just how the experience had made them feel.
Another participant had a tradition with their father to send him five good things about every day. On scrolling back, they saw that their pond swims were regularly evidenced in this digital archive of their daily experiences.
I didn't find these communications surprising - for all of my participants swimming at the pond was an important part of their lives, and the highlight of a day or week. Of course they might share that experience with family and friends. But most participants were surprised to observe the digital footprint of their swims when previously they’d assumed they would be completely analogue experiences. One remarked that they hadn’t ever really connected their experiences swimming with texts to friends and family, that they might exist ephemerally there as a record. Another observed after the research period that thinking about this at length had made them consider whether or why they felt the need to broadcast swimming to others.
"There's an interplay between it being totally solo experience, but then sort of also wanting that to be a record or like, wanting to share it with someone - not so much the experience itself but the fact of it having happened."
I have a different relationship with social media than my participants, as I am fairly active online. When I first began swimming at the ponds I found myself sharing much more across social media about swimming in general, as is obvious from some of my Instagram stories above. And in part because I was thinking about swimming a lot while working on this ethnography, I found myself sharing more about swimming related things - like the example below from my Twitter. But perhaps this is what my participants all referred to as the first thrill of being part of the community - the desire to tell as many people as possible about what you’re doing.
As I swam more, I found I needed the widely share about it less. I was able to revel in my own smugness without broadcasting it; privately message people I knew were interested in cold water swimming as opposed to telling the world I was doing something that most consider mad. It felt like a mini, hastened trajectory of what my participants described having gone through in terms of their social media output - and underlined the usefulness of the auto-ethnographic approach as well.
