34
M. Baranowski and D. Mroczkowska
5 Conclusions
The contemporary discourse on sustainability points to the need for substantial, if not
radical, shifts in relation to productivity, the environment, consumption, and identities
in ways that bring or restore its balance to intersecting domains. The literature on
leisure shows excellent examples contributing to full ecology planning approaches.
Nevertheless, the approach to leisure and the changes taking place within it cannot
be abstracted from the more general projects that outline the area of social welfare
sustainability, as well as from the technological changes taking place in the life of
each of us.
We think that leisure is a central feature of the future of sustainability and also
society, and an understanding of this is an essential ingredient for all policy-makers,
academics, and service providers. Looking at leisure through the prism of external
processes and transformations allows us to see that the relations between the external
context and the practices implemented within it are much more complicated, which in
turn makes it difficult to maintain precision and unambiguity in defining the category
itself. This makes it more dynamic and open, and forces us to open up research fields
that have so far escaped the attention of researchers, or to look at the problems posed
so far in a new light. Thus, contemporary thinking about leisure is not only an attempt
to classify and quantify its activity, to look for clearer and standard definitions of
it, but above all, to individualize the experience, filling it with private, idiosyncratic
experiences or interpretations.
However, any attempt to explore leisure without taking into account the influence
of “invisible” technologies operating in the background, which have a measurable
impact both on our working practices and on the structure of thinking about and
organizing extra-work time, lacks real explanatory power. While we smile at the fact
that the motive behind the algorithmization of life in general lies in the commercialization of reality, it is impossible to exclude the analysis of leisure time from this
area. Leisure time is an attractive bite for large corporations and small enterprises,
whether, through commoditization, drawing conclusions from algorithmic analyses
in other areas of human life, or “subcutaneous” generation of “optimal” decisions
and needs. This chapter, as a contribution to highlight what is by definition invisible
in the context of leisure time and sustainable development, was intended to draw
attention to the potential role of new technologies based on big data and algorithms
in leisure. With the exception of tourism (cf. Souffriau et al., 2008), this area has not
seen advanced research combining leisure time practices with general concepts of
sustainable development.
References
All C (2011) Energy use and leisure consumption in Norway: An analysis and reduction strategy.
J Sustain Tourism 19(6):729–745. https://doi.org/10.1080/09669582.2010.536241
M. Baranowski and D. Mroczkowska
5 Conclusions
The contemporary discourse on sustainability points to the need for substantial, if not
radical, shifts in relation to productivity, the environment, consumption, and identities
in ways that bring or restore its balance to intersecting domains. The literature on
leisure shows excellent examples contributing to full ecology planning approaches.
Nevertheless, the approach to leisure and the changes taking place within it cannot
be abstracted from the more general projects that outline the area of social welfare
sustainability, as well as from the technological changes taking place in the life of
each of us.
We think that leisure is a central feature of the future of sustainability and also
society, and an understanding of this is an essential ingredient for all policy-makers,
academics, and service providers. Looking at leisure through the prism of external
processes and transformations allows us to see that the relations between the external
context and the practices implemented within it are much more complicated, which in
turn makes it difficult to maintain precision and unambiguity in defining the category
itself. This makes it more dynamic and open, and forces us to open up research fields
that have so far escaped the attention of researchers, or to look at the problems posed
so far in a new light. Thus, contemporary thinking about leisure is not only an attempt
to classify and quantify its activity, to look for clearer and standard definitions of
it, but above all, to individualize the experience, filling it with private, idiosyncratic
experiences or interpretations.
However, any attempt to explore leisure without taking into account the influence
of “invisible” technologies operating in the background, which have a measurable
impact both on our working practices and on the structure of thinking about and
organizing extra-work time, lacks real explanatory power. While we smile at the fact
that the motive behind the algorithmization of life in general lies in the commercialization of reality, it is impossible to exclude the analysis of leisure time from this
area. Leisure time is an attractive bite for large corporations and small enterprises,
whether, through commoditization, drawing conclusions from algorithmic analyses
in other areas of human life, or “subcutaneous” generation of “optimal” decisions
and needs. This chapter, as a contribution to highlight what is by definition invisible
in the context of leisure time and sustainable development, was intended to draw
attention to the potential role of new technologies based on big data and algorithms
in leisure. With the exception of tourism (cf. Souffriau et al., 2008), this area has not
seen advanced research combining leisure time practices with general concepts of
sustainable development.
References
All C (2011) Energy use and leisure consumption in Norway: An analysis and reduction strategy.
J Sustain Tourism 19(6):729–745. https://doi.org/10.1080/09669582.2010.536241