Counter-Cultural Aura of Extreme & Active Sports Athletes

Lifestyle & extreme sports refer to a range of land, air and water based activities such as BMX, mountain biking, skateboarding, snowboarding and surfing and encompass a wide variety of experiences often understood as ‘adventurous’ ‘extreme’, or importantly as ‘alternative’ from dominant or traditional sports.

These activities often involve speed, height, a high level of physical exertion, and highly specialized gear.

One common aspect of an extreme sport is a counter-cultural aura — a rejection of authority and of the status quo by disaffected youth. Some youth of Generation Y have seized upon activities which they can claim as their own, and have begun rejecting more traditional sports in increasing numbers.

Lifestyle sports report the highest rates of participation amongst children and young people under 25 years and hold important connections with youth culture which could enable young people to participate in different ways than may be available through ‘traditional’ school or club led sport.

Lifestyle sport communities place central importance on the individual expression of identity and the social relationships formed between participants who share the same cultural values, attitudes and ethos.

Through a tremendous increase of new media channels, customers are much more integrated in brand related communications. While in earlier years, the stream of information was almost exclusively directed from the company towards the customer through mass media like TV or newspapers, nowadays the communications are dynamic and two-sided, also directed from the customers towards the company (e.g. on social media sites) or for instance in the shape of social influences on other consumers’ buying decision through word of mouth — WOM.

Through smartphones, customers can search for information not only whenever, but also wherever they need it, thus making mobile advertising a promising new communication option. The potential to personalize marketing communications and thereby increase efficiency and relevance for the customer has significantly increased.

The mass and niche media are central to lifestyle sporting cultures, fueling their popularity and transnational cultural influence, as well as being integral to the everyday lives of young people.

Offering instant communication across the world, new media technologies may have accelerated the dissolution of barriers of time and space, redefining notions of the global and local and offering possibilities for the development of new communities based on affinities of interest, politics or any form of cultural identity.

While we should remain cautious towards the alleged impacts of technologically driven social change, new media technologies play an essential role in the social lives of many young people with websites, blogs and social media tools enabling interaction and social networking between participants as well as being important resources for social support, learning skills, community organization and the provision of information on participative opportunities and events.