Being read while reading: ultracycling and literacies under benign surveillance

This paper argues that ultracycling foregrounds precarious forms of reading distributed across screens, road signs, bodies, machines, and environments, and performed under conditions of continuous visibility and physical exertion. Drawing on autoethnographic data such as fieldnotes, GPS traces, and platform interactions, I examine reading while ultracycling as an affective, situated practice through which riders make consequential claims about their surroundings and their bodies.

Ultracycling involves continuous shifts between reading screens (GPS devices, smartphones), notices (road signage, warnings), bodies (pain, fatigue, sleep), machines (air pressure, battery signals), and the environment (terrain, weather, light, road texture). These reading practices unfold within a second layer of interpretation: in what I call benign surveillance (commonly known as “dotwatching”), riders are themselves continuously read through live tracking and social media, generating a reflexive loop in which reading and being read become mutually conditioning.

Ultracycling extends work on workplace literacies by examining high-intensity, mobile forms of non-office labor where environmental, embodied, and infrastructural reading practices are tightly interwoven. I argue that literacy in this context is a form of real-time coordination across heterogeneous inputs under reflexive visibility: riders must align multiple modes of reading while anticipating how their actions will be interpreted by others. Ultracycling thus reframes literacy as a precarious, embodied, environmental, and publicly performed accomplishment under conditions of continuous visibility in datafied, mobile worlds.