Sociotechnical Scale| Scales for a Community: How Strava Mediates the Body and Space to Enact Place-Based Imaginaries

Abstract

This article interrogates how the popular exercise platform Strava uses scale to reconfigure both bodies and places into units of community and commodity. Focusing on the design of Strava’s most distinctive feature, the Segment, I analyze how design decisions mobilize scale not simply as neutral measurement but as sociotechnical infrastructure privileging certain ideologies and place-based meanings. Examining the deployments of scale through Segments shows how this feature enacts a scaling imaginary: the belief that aggregating individual corporeal data produces collective meaning. Through this imaginary, Strava flattens embodied difference into standardized forms of digital placemaking, redefining community on platform-defined terms of athletic performance, health, and belonging. This article shows how platform providers use scale to commodify bodily activity and impose their meanings of place-based community onto end-users themselves.