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Immergut, Matthew
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Spring 2020
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2020
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Meditation is a spiritual practice with roots in the East but has been imported to the West. In this process, meditation has been secularized on a variety of fronts such as medicine and healthcare, business, sports, and so on. We can also see this trend of secularization happening through technology. Specifically, mindfulness-based mobile applications (MBMA) are being produced as well as wearable devices are being created for an increasingly competitive meditation market. We wanted to understand the place, force, and role of these meditation apps as they circulate in contemporary culture. As a way in, we both did an autoethnographic and semiological analysis of these apps. What we discovered were three major themes: Complexities and Contradictions; This Worldly Secular Salvation; The Sociology of Meditation Apps. In theme one we found that there are inherent complexities and contradictions in using meditation apps – that by using these apps they were both helping and hurting us, giving us relief from stress but simultaneously immersing us further into our devices which may be increasing our stress and anxiety. In our next theme, we found that these apps are offering “secular salvation” similarly to how religions provide salvation. The difference is that “secular salvation” is focused on this-worldly benefits such as stress reduction rather than the other-worldly benefits like Nirvana. Our last theme points to if and how these apps create human communities, specifically looking at Stark and Bainbridge’s ideas around client cults.
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