Abstract
This article demonstrates how meditation apps, such as Headspace and Calm, are imbricated within public discourse about technology addiction, exploring the consequences of this discourse on contemporary mental life. Based on ethnographic research with designers and users of meditation apps, I identify a promise put forth by meditation app companies that I call attention by design: a discursive strategy that frames attention as an antidote to technology addiction, which is ostensibly made possible when design is done right. I argue that attention by design is a promise unfulfilled. Meditation app companies construct attention as socially valuable by endlessly pointing out its purported opposite, technology addiction. Attention by design is promissory in that it keeps promising even when it doesn’t deliver what it promises, compelling the user to return to a practice that represents socially desirable traits that can never be fully acquired—and that often recede further from reach as the person becomes distracted by other obligations and communication mediated through the smartphone. Despite this broken promise, users believe they are becoming more attentive. The promissory attention designed into meditation apps reflects a new form of governmentality, in which users receive a mental nudge to reinterpret similarly designed experiences as different.
Introduction
It’s 8:30 a.m. on a December morning in Sydney, Australia, when Christopher Plowman, the CEO of the meditation app 1 Insight Timer, joins our online call looking as though he had just hopped out of the shower. He seems light-hearted and casual, but Christopher has cause for concern. A week earlier, he self-published an article on Medium, in which he publicly worried that the Insight Timer app wouldn’t survive due to the spending and advertising habits of two competing meditation apps, Headspace and Calm. According to Christopher’s market research, 63 percent of the time spent on meditation apps in the United States is spent on Insight Timer, yet “rarely do they [journalists] write about how many of the downloads convert to meditators, or how much time people spend on them, or how often people return each week—“metrics” that actually matter when nurturing a meditation practice” (Plowman 2018).
The heart of Christopher’s critique is that the technology industry—and the media sources that cover it—emphasizes funding and hype over actual usage and user value. He explains to me further: What’s important to us is we’re trying to create revenue streams that complement your meditation practice. They don’t commercialize it. What we mean by that is if you look at apps like Headspace and Calm, for example, so you download their app, you get to play with it for five minutes, they teach you a little bit of meditation, and then if you want to continue the paywall pops up, right? It’s an exclusive model.
Ironically, the advertisements that help Headspace and Calm garner attention for their companies use strategies that capitalize on public concern about the negative effects of digital connection on attention and mental well-being. Carefully placed within a stream of information on social media, Calm often commands potential users’ attention by asking them to take a quick break from other online platforms. Calm’s Twitter account regularly features a short video with a naturalistic background and a timer that counts down thirty seconds, encouraging the viewer to stop and do nothing. 2 Headspace sets similar reminders, encouraging people on social media to take breaks 3 and breathe in and out at intervals as they scroll through their feeds. 4
This article critically analyzes the pitfalls of the meditation app industry’s promise not only to preserve but also to heighten what I refer to as “attention by design”—a discursive strategy that frames attention as an antidote to technology addiction 5 that ostensibly is made possible when design is done right. By contrasting the intentions of meditation app designers with the lived experiences of meditation app users, I argue that attention by design is a promise unfulfilled. Meditation app companies utilize the very same business tactics and design patterns as the larger digital platforms they critique, such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. They construct “attention” as socially valuable by referring regularly to its purported opposite––“technology addiction”––a state of constant distraction. Attention by design is promissory in that it keeps promising even when it doesn’t deliver what it promises (Ahmed 2010), compelling the user to return to a practice that represents socially desirable traits—attention, and ultimately mindfulness—that can never be fully acquired and that tend to recede further from reach as the person becomes distracted by other obligations and communication mediated through the smartphone.
Meditation apps facilitate promissory attention by endlessly pointing to the possibility of mindful attention through reminders, recommendations, and ironic advertisements, while ultimately relying upon a receptive audience of users who are willing and able to commit to the practice of meditation in spite of technology design—not because of it. The attention designed into meditation apps thus is not the mindful attention that is promised, but rather reflects forms of attention considered more valuable and profitable to the broader technology industry—an attention that is malleable, compulsive, and distracted.
Nonetheless, users interpret their experiences on the apps as positive because of the promissory, self-reinforcing way digitally mediated attention is figured in contrast to digital addiction. This ultimately implies that people’s interpretation of their experiences becomes a more powerful predictor of their sense of agency than the experiences themselves, demonstrating how Foucault’s (1978) notion of “governmentality”—a central concept utilized in scholarly work on digital health—operates more subtly in digital mental health technologies. Rather than producing a “micronudge” toward a desired behavior (Schüll 2016), they produce a mental nudge toward a desired interpretation of the vast set of experiences now mediated through digital apps.
Methods
This article is based on eighteen months of ethnographic research and interviews with designers and users of meditation apps in North America. My research was conducted between February 2018 and May 2019, during which time I attended numerous technology industry events, conferences, and meetups 6 throughout the United States and Canada to observe the meditation app design community and recruit subjects for interviews. I also conducted two site visits at meditation app companies in Los Angeles and Toronto. This sampling strategy reflects a community-centered approach (Forsythe 2001), which aims to follow a community of practice—the meditation app sector of the technology industry—that is dispersed over multiple locations rather than housed within a single organization. Because access to extended on-site observation was limited, I conducted seventeen semi-structured interviews with meditation app designers to learn about how they think about and perform their work. This is a common tactic used by ethnographers of the technology industry, who often rely on interviews to produce contextual information despite the methodological constraints of accessing technology companies (Seaver 2017).
To contrast how meditation apps are conceived and promoted with how they are experienced in real situations, I conducted twenty-one semi-structured interviews with users of three popular meditation apps—Headspace, Calm, and Insight Timer—all who are based in the United States. My sampling strategy was designed to support maximum variation in users by recruiting people who varied by demographic factors, reasons for usage, and extent of usage. Since no meditation app user studies had been published at the time I began my research, I designed this study to inform the trajectory of future research on this topic by mapping out the broader terrain of meditation app usage. The dual focus on both the designers’ and the users’ experience of design follows what Suchman (2011) calls “a critical anthropology of design,” which can “articulate the cultural imaginaries and micropolitics that delineate design’s promises and practices” (p. 3). This approach, when applied to a study of meditation apps, can demonstrate the important role technology designers now play in shaping public discourse about mental life, creating contemporary “technologies of the self” (Foucault 1988) that live within—and also resist—historically specific forms of biopolitical 7 control. I also build heavily upon the work of Natasha Dow Schüll’s (2012) Addiction by Design, utilizing the case study of meditation apps to surface new insight into how design patterns and business practices of the technology industry mediate people’s mental experiences at an increasingly pervasive scale.
A Brief History of Headspace and Calm
The origin stories of Headspace and Calm demonstrate the tensions inherent in transmitting the values of the meditation community through a technical solution, even though those values were, over time, slowly bending toward the ideals and goals of the technology industry. Andy Puddicombe, the voice and teacher behind the popular Headspace app, which has 31 million users (Perez and Lunden 2018), was living in London and operating a private meditation clinic when he was introduced to a new client, Richard Pierson, a burnt-out business man who wanted to learn how to cope with stress (Chan 2015). According to Headspace’s official origin story (Headspace n.d.), earlier in his life Puddicombe spent ten years studying meditation in the Himalayas after leaving a university sports science program, a journey that culminated in his ordination as a Tibetan Buddhist Monk. He returned to London in 2004 and found that he and Richard Pearson had much to learn from each other: Pearson learned the fundamentals of meditation, while Puddicombe learned business skills. Soon, Pearson convinced Puddicombe that he could help only so many people through his private meditation clinic, urging him to make a meditation app; it could scale Puddicombe’s activities much more easily and help more people. At first, Puddicombe was skeptical about making an app, but Pearson convinced him of its benefits and they began their journey as business partners when incorporating Headspace in 2010 (Chan 2015). Headspace remained largely under the radar of the technology industry for several years, raising its initial investor funding in 2014. It then raised $34.3 million in 2015, $36.7 million in 2017, and another $93 million in 2020. 8
The origin story of the Calm app suggests a similar tension between the values of mindfulness and the values of technology and capitalism, though it is peculiar in the way the tension affects Calm’s tactics for capturing attention. In 2012, Alex Tew and Michael Acton Smith cofounded the Calm app. According to Tew’s own online account (Tew n.d.), he was a regular practitioner of mindfulness meditation since he was a teenager. At that time, he built a simple prototype of a website to help people meditate but then ran out of money and soon became engrossed in other ventures. In 2002, after finishing high school, Tew became a touring beatboxer 9 and started the first beatboxing forum, HumanBeatbox.com (Crockett 2018). He became frustrated with his lack of money and focused intently on figuring out how to make $1 million to fund his college education. He soon invented The Million Dollar Homepage, a website with 1 million pixels that could be purchased by advertisers for $1 per pixel. When the Million Dollar Homepage went viral and was picked up by major news outlets, Alex unexpectedly became a millionaire in four months. This instant success left him depressed as he tried to figure out his next major business venture, leading him to move from London to join an incubator in San Francisco.
Tew eventually returned to his longtime interest in mindfulness meditation and to his original idea of building a meditation website (Tew n.d.). He built donothingfor2minutes.com, which was a two-minute meditation timer that restarted if the user moved their cursor—a design decision that directly linked meditative practice with taking a short break from the Internet (Crockett 2018). That early design choice suggests that Tew intended to minimize a certain type of distracted attention shaped by digital platforms (Bucher 2012) and facilitate a more mindful, focused form of attention by design. Tew created a more extensive web app on Calm.com in 2012, which offered users free ten-minute guided meditations and other content that could be purchased with a subscription. Tew’s cofounder, Michael Acton Smith, was an entrepreneur in digital entertainment before entering into the world of digital health. In 2003, he founded the British entertainment company, Mind Candy, whose flagship product was a video game called Moshi Monsters, which has been criticized for being addictive (Ghosh 2017). By 2019, Calm had raised enough funding to reach a $1 billion valuation (Crook 2019), placing Headspace and Calm at the center of what the media has called a “meditation battle that’s anything but Zen” (Potkewitz 2018). Such discourse highlights the ironic tension that meditation app companies inhabit, if not embrace: they promote relaxation and mindfulness; yet they also create sociotechnical conditions that reward constant user engagement on digital devices and streamline leisure activity to fit within socially sanctioned modes of capitalist consumption that promote productivity (Gregg 2018) and effective time management (Wajcman 2019). Attention becomes the lens through which these top meditation app companies justify their aggressive expansion, promising that—with the right design—a user’s former digital “addiction” can be shaped into a mindful form of attention.
Designers’ Promises of Attention
Attention and Agency
Meditation app companies discursively frame their tools as alternatives to social media platforms that have been embroiled in public concerns about technology addiction (Alter 2017; Carr 2010; Morgans 2017). Designers and product owners throughout my research regularly expressed the belief that they were channeling the addictive properties of digital technology toward a healthier form of attention that could restore for users a sense of agency, control, and even personal meaning. For example, Jay Vidyarthi, the former user experience design director of the Muse meditation headband, considers his work at the intersection of mindfulness and technology to be a form of “attention activism” that is “not just about health and well-being anymore. It’s about exercising your right to decide what to pay attention to. It’s about resisting those who want to profit from selling something that belongs to you” (Vidyarthi 2016). Technologically mediated meditation practice becomes a way for both designers and users to appropriate technology, “seizing the means” (Murphy 2012) through which technology controls mental life and instead using it for one’s self-care.
Some designers openly admitted the irony of using an app to solve the problems associated with other apps. Vicki Tan, the former Lead Product Designer at Headspace, described her work as: inherently a bit hypocritical—or I should say there’s a tension—because of the way apps and digital products rely on notifications to keep people engaged…at the very least, we hope our notifications will help you pause and be more mindful about how much time you’re spending on your device. Rather than pulling you in to waste time or feel bad about social media, we’re pulling you in to help you.
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In our interview, the Vice President of Product Management at a popular meditation app company explained that people turn to meditation apps because they are looking to escape: the fundamental conditions of modern life…. A million distractions. A million demands for your attention all at once…. People going to bed feeling upset with themselves because of their friends’ Instagram accounts. They can’t focus their way through a conversation with their partner because their Apple watch keeps buzzing. In a lot of ways, I see things like Muse or Headspace or Calm as a technological antidote to the problems that technology has introduced.
The Promise
Science and technology studies (STS) scholars have used the analytic of the “promise” as a means of interrogating the dynamics of hope, hype, and anticipation that surround novel technologies. In his history and ethnography of the deCODE Genetics project in Iceland, Fortun (2008) frames the promise as both a performative speech act and a process that “opens a channel to a volatile future that promising itself helps to bring about, a future that will have provided the only underwriting the originary promise can be said to ever had” (p. 108). In a study of assisted reproductive technology, Thompson (2005) argues that biomedical technologies are promissory in that they change the temporal orientation of capitalism from the past and present to the future, creating a promissory capital that “signals a shift away from production, productivity, and profit and toward knowledge, technologies of life, and promise” (p. 258). Promises surrounding biomedical technologies and biotechnology thus are deeply entwined with the entrepreneurial accumulation of capital (Sunder Rajan 2006). Petersen and Krisjansen (2015) argue that promissory discourse in contemporary biopolitics is best understood as performative (Butler 2010; MacKenzie, Muniesa, and Siu 2007) and “helps to bring about that which is described” (Petersen and Krisjansen 2015, 31).
Given the link that public discourse and scientific research draw between meditation, mental health, and happiness, I draw heavily from cultural studies scholar Sara Ahmed’s (2010) book The Promise of Happiness. For Ahmed, happiness is promissory in that its positive affective register is solidified before it is experienced. The social value of happiness is circulated throughout society through “happy objects” (p. 21), which reproduce the desire for happiness and automatically associate happiness with the object of desire—thus reinforcing that object as good––causing happiness. Ahmed’s happy objects function with an “anticipatory causality,” as “Objects can become ‘happiness-causes’ before we even encounter them. We are directed toward objects that are already anticipated to cause happiness. In other words, the judgment that some things are good not only precedes our encounter with things but directs us toward those things” (p. 28).
Ahmed’s conceptualization of the promise is particularly useful for understanding contemporary discourses surrounding meditation apps, which promise a certain type of attention associated with meditation—one that is deemed desirable, healthy, and good—in contrast to the compulsive, addictive form of attention that other digital technologies supposedly encourage. Jon Kabat Zinn (a doctor who popularized mindfulness meditation in the United States by creating the mindfulness-based stress reduction program) defines mindfulness as “awareness that arises through paying attention, on purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally” (quoted in Mindful Staff 2017). This definition is widely circulated among meditation communities in the United States, solidifying a specific form of attention as desirable. As the techniques of mindfulness meditation and other styles of meditation have been transferred and transmitted through new technologies, meditation apps become attention objects much in the same way that things become happy objects in Ahmed’s work: attention is promised through the circulation of the object itself, most prominently in online advertisements where the app is presented as a designated healthy space, in contrast to the other “addictive” apps that capture one’s attention and lead to distraction.
As Petersen (2018) demonstrates in his analysis of the promissory discourse of the anti-ageing treatment market, promises rely on public anxiety and capitalize upon and exploit this anxiety to create new, profitable markets. Meditation app companies’ promise of attention by design capitalizes on widespread public concern about smartphone and social media addiction (Alter 2017; Morgans 2017), which is said to produce inter-generational differences in cognition (Carr 2010) and negatively impact social life (Rushkoff 2019; Turkle 2011). In response to the moral panic surrounding these issues, and other trends he saw when working within the technology industry, ex-Google Design Ethicist Tristan Harris started the Center for Humane Technology, a Silicon Valley-based organization that critiques persuasive design tactics and advances a mission “to reverse human downgrading by inspiring a new race to the top and realigning technology with humanity.” 11 Natasha Dow Schüll’s book Addiction by Design (2012) has been a prominent source of inspiration in Tristan Harris’ agenda. Harris (2016) draws on Schüll’s work and refers to the smartphone as “the slot machine in your pocket,” drawing a direct parallel between the design of machine gambling and the design of everyday mobile devices and apps.
Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Las Vegas, Schüll (2012) documented the cultural shift from card gambling to slot machine gambling that was facilitated by the rise of the personal computer and electronic games in the United States. Schüll found that many of the most addicted gamblers do not continue gambling in order to win, but to stay in “the machine zone,” an altered state of consciousness. As the gambling industry embraced the medicalization of excessive gambling, and claimed it was only a problem within a minority of people who are predisposed to addiction, politicians, researchers, clinicians, and gamblers rightfully asked, “Are the problems in the product, the user, or their interactions?” (p. 16). Schüll documents where the design of the gambling experience contributes to gambling addiction, outlining examples from architecture, casino design, city design, machine design, and the more overt psychological reward systems of game design. Tristan Harris’s adaptation of the argument in Addiction by Design has important explanatory power in the context of the attention economy (Goldhaber 1997). The Center for Humane Technology has successfully garnered support from design and business leaders within the technology industry and technology policy communities, just as they have adopted the center’s language and goals while seeking solutions to these problems (Piven 2019).
Users’ Experiences of Attention
Users interviewed throughout this research regularly adopted the aforementioned public discourse by using the contrasting poles of addiction and attention to explain their digital experiences. At the same time, many remained uncritical of the fact that the design patterns used to mobilize their attention were the same as the design patterns they understood to be “addictive.” Some noted the irony but blamed themselves when the app wasn’t working for them, concluding that they needed to be more mindful and pay more attention—reinforcing the value of the meditation app in a circular fashion. In this section, I identify the forms of attention that meditation app users do experience by design, linking them to dominant design patterns and business models of the technology industry.
Malleable Attention/Getting “Hooked”
Ryan
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is a shy, thoughtful college freshman who has been suffering from depression since he was nine, insomnia since he was twelve, and an anxiety that intensified when starting college. As an engineering physics major, avid video gamer, and self-proclaimed “tech kid,” he regularly uses technology to help manage his mental health, pursue his interests, and feel normal. Recently, Ryan was binge-watching science videos on YouTube late at night when an advertisement for the meditation app Headspace began playing. Andy Puddicombe, the main voice of Headspace, spoke in a slow, soothing British drawl and instructed him to close his eyes and focus on his breath. Ryan describes this moment with excitement and slight disbelief: They actually caught my attention because normally I don’t listen to ads, I just ignore them, but the ads for Headspace go through what they do. It’s an insight into what Headspace is all about, and the ads were actually very relaxing. They’re very persuasive, because it just gives you their product basically. And actually it worked for me, so that’s what I’d say got my attention, and got me thinking “I should actually try this.”
Compulsive Attention/Losing Control
Meditation app users interviewed throughout this research regularly described their broader technology usage habits through the lens of popular critiques of technology “addiction,” while turning a blind eye to their compulsive use of meditation apps. Madeleine, aged thirty-two, is a middle school teacher who uses the Calm web app with her students to keep them relaxed and focused. She not only interprets her own personal experiences through the lens of technology addiction but believes her students are addicted as well: They don’t have cell phones, but when we do bring technology into the classroom…they’ll sneak on the computers when you’re not looking and they’ll be like, “Oh, let’s try and get some YouTube going.”…It’s really irritating, but it’s kind of like when I teach they have to be constantly stimulated. When I’m teaching, if I want to teach for fifteen minutes and then let them be, I can’t do that anymore. I’ve got to have them stimulated in five-minute increments. Five minutes, and then you do something else…like they are on crack. It’s very hypocritical considering I was just talking about the students being constantly addicted to their devices, but I totally am. I am on my phone all the time…even when I’m not working, like during the summer or break, then that’s when I’m like, “Oh my gosh, TV. I haven’t watched TV in nine months. This is fantastic.” Then I’m binge-watching all of the shows!
Josh, a PhD student in his late twenties, lamented his personal loss of control while using his smartphone and various social media platforms. He tried to limit his use of Facebook only to keeping up with local events rather than for regular communication. However, he found it difficult, explaining to me: “algorithms are designed to keep us clicking. Facebook and other social media—especially Facebook—because the whole business is advertising revenue. They want us to click, and I can feel that, while I’m using it.” Despite this critique, Josh began using the Calm app and another mental health app, 7 Cups, after seeing advertisements for them on Instagram. He recognizes that the apps can’t replace going to in-person meditation classes or attending therapy sessions, but technology is the only solution he can fit into his busy work schedule consistently. His use of meditation apps thus remains palliative, providing a temporary fix that is interchangeable with other fixes. Sometimes when he is stressed, he opens the Calm app and watches the dynamic visual of water running on the welcome screen. Other times, he pulls out the lavender essential oil he keeps in his pocket. He doesn’t expect to achieve a state of mindful attention from the meditation app—he simply expects to feel better in the moment.
Distracted Attention/Endless Consumption
During my fieldwork, Headspace and Calm began to develop new methods of engagement that treated their user base more like an audience in need of entertainment than a group of meditation practitioners. While the advertisements and initially free content were able to lure people into downloading and using a meditation app, many struggled with sustaining long-term attention and engagement on the apps. This wasn’t due simply to poorly executed behavioral design, as meditation app designers might believe, but was often because users’ smartphone actively distracted them from meditating. The very reason people were initially attracted to a technological solution—its promise of a quick and easy route to mindfulness—eventually became a barrier to developing a successful meditation practice.
Jessica, aged forty-six, uses Headspace several times a week for between three and ten minutes at a time. She often doesn’t meditate while using the app but instead listens to Andy Puddicombe’s soothing voice while multitasking—answering e-mails, washing the dishes, and going about her day while the smartphone plays. Her usage habits resemble those of a podcast listener, who is often expected to be “a busy, productive, and self-improving individual performing, among others, mundane, solitary, adult tasks” (Sharon and John 2019). The meditation app doesn’t absorb her full attention but simply reminds her of the things she would like to pay more attention to when she has the time—notably her own self-care. One of her favorite features of the app is the mindfulness quote sent out to users as notifications, explaining: I find helpful the little mindfulness moment pop-up—when I have started to do something on Headspace, but then I haven’t actually done the meditation, and then some takeaway from that will pop up and I’ll be like, “Okay, right. Okay.” So I find the little sayings to be good reminders of the content and that like, oh yeah, I might want to make time for that.
Thomas, a twenty-four-year-old web designer, used the Insight Timer app every day after completing an online, mindfulness-based stress reduction course. At the time of our interview, he had recently stopped using Insight Timer after upgrading to Google’s Pixel 3 smartphone, speculating: I think it’s the new phone. No, seriously. It’s really thrown me off, I was really on this train, and then this phone has been a crazy toy that’s very hard to not play with in one way. The camera’s really good. If I’m at something, or with somebody, I’d be interested in doing photography with them. Because I can make great photos with it, and I can practice that. It’s a suck, in terms of messaging. It’s just quick and fast, where I always felt bad messaging, because it was too slow, or whatever. Now, it’s just super quick and easy to do.
Similarly, Michelle, a twenty-nine-year-old working mom, arrives at her office early every morning to meditate with the Headspace app in a private meeting room. She checks her e-mail compulsively right before meditating to clear her head and be certain she doesn’t have anything urgent to do. She leaves her laptop at her desk, away from where she meditates, and puts her phone in Do Not Disturb Mode. Protecting herself from the pings of technology and the guilt associated with ignoring e-mail is essential for her effective use of the meditation app; in fact, it becomes part of her habitual routine.
Other meditation app users place less emphasis on overcoming their “addiction” with attention, demonstrating a belief in their conceptual and material slippage. Ciara, aged forty, laments in an interview that she can’t seem to make her use of Insight Timer a habit. She remains stuck in a pattern of turning to the app for guidance and stress relief during particularly hectic times, when she notices that she’s feeling bad and “losing control,” and then discarding the app when she begins to feel better. She speculates that she hasn’t been able to meditate as much as she’d like to because she’s not addicted to meditation, explaining: I work out regularly—more regularly than meditating. I’ll work out at least two to three times a week, but I’m not consistent. It’s not a routine. I’m just like, “Okay, I need to work out.” But I think my body’s kind of addicted to working out in a way. I need to work out, whereas with meditation I don’t think I have that addiction yet.
The “Real” Mindfulness
Ciara’s only way out of this spiral is the act of paying attention and noticing when her emotions are out of control—demonstrating that the attention she experiences doesn’t happen by design but through her own efforts. While the meditation app helps her to an extent, she doesn’t see all usage as equal. Rather, she draws a clear distinction between listening to a guided meditation and using the timer functionality to do a self-guided meditation. With the former, “you’re just paying attention to somebody speaking,” whereas with the latter, you’re using “the better tool, which is real mindfulness—either focusing on your breath or paying attention to your thoughts.”
Through this reflection, it becomes clear that even though Ciara uses meditation apps, she doesn’t fully believe in the promises meditation app companies make. Instead, Ciara ultimately prioritizes developing her skills in attention through self-guided meditation—what she calls “building the muscle.” This is similar to Rudra, a forty-three-year-old executive director in San Francisco who describes attention as a form of discernment, in which you know when you need an app and when you need something else. After years of extensive study in his home country of India and later in the United States, Rudra is surprisingly proud of the fact that he now meditates with an app for thirty minutes twice a day. His new practice reflects his acceptance of ambiguity and paradox as well as an understanding of freedom and agency influenced by his upbringing in India: I think at least when I started out it was always freedom from. Freedom from this. Freedom from that. Freedom from the vicissitude of life. Freedom in terms of one’s character will remain unaffected or to rise up above or a quest for some kind of transcendence to rise above the humdrum of life. The change is almost a 180 degree change. Now it’s just freedom in. It’s less about trying to step out of life and more in terms of dissolving into life itself. It’s just to find freedom in whatever one is doing. It’s almost like one completely enters the river of life and just flows with it, which is a way different sense of freedom.
Conclusion: Mazes, Traps, and Promissory Apps
Rudra’s conceptualization of “freedom in” turns the question of whether meditation apps are addictive on its head, offering an opportunity to reconsider whether Schüll’s (2012) argument that addiction happens by design is useful to make in this contemporary moment—when widespread concerns about technology addiction often reflect an upper middle–class moral panic about technological and social change (Ames 2019) rather than a disease. Nonetheless, the concepts Schüll deployed in her analysis of gambling addiction are useful tools to think with when considering the paradox inherent to meditation apps. In particular, Schüll (2006) utilizes the metaphors of the circuit and the maze to demonstrate how gambling addicts were suspended in “circuits of dependency and self-care,” which kept them circling between digital gambling addiction and therapeutic self-help. The spatial design of Las Vegas was the larger circuit in which people acted. Roads were designed to bring people to casinos and casinos were designed to bring people to machines. At the heart of this metaphor is an understanding of space as physical and digital: the slot machine is placed within a world in which agentic movement is possible yet circumscribed down particular paths.
Until recently, there have been few new theoretical resources for understanding the seemingly compulsive symbiosis between people and digital technology that Schüll identified, aside from blindly adopting the popular narrative that technology designed within the “attention economy” is optimized to be “addictive.” Through ethnographic research into contemporary online streaming services, Seaver (2018) theorizes the algorithmic recommender system as a “trap,” an analytical tool he hopes “offers an alternative to common ethical framings that oppose tropes of freedom and coercion” (p. 1). He demonstrates that traps are not conceived and executed through merely physical coercion, but are psychologically persuasive: they embody and inhabit the mind of the object to be trapped and inspire them to enter the trap not by brute force but by using knowledge of how they think and behave to their opportunistic advantage. By extending the metaphor of the trap toward algorithmic recommendation, Seaver does not condemn the algorithm as a morally wrong technology that uniformly reduces human agency. Rather, his conceptualization encourages scholars to embrace the nuance of algorithms as social actors that are coproduced with human desires, beliefs, and needs.
While the trap is also a useful metaphor to think with, it also brings with it certain limitations. On the one hand, traps successfully illustrate a state of mutual dependency while avoiding the more medicalized term of technology “addiction,” which has been the source of much public and scholarly debate (Widyanto and Griffiths 2006). On the other hand, a “trap” implies a static moment in which a person is suspended and can’t move beyond. The trap is a binary condition—you’re either trapped or you’re not. Traps don’t necessarily ring true to meditation app users, who often adopt technologies flexibly for their own purposes and whose sense of attention and distraction often occur simultaneously.
While meditation app users might appear to be “addicted” to their phones and thus trapped in an algorithmically recommended loop—cycling between digital apps that harm them and digital apps that help them—the stories recounted in this research demonstrate that their sense of agency to reclaim attention might not lie in a technological solution or even within a practice. Rather, agency is located in people’s interpretation of their experiences—it is articulated through their understanding of common behavioral design patterns (Eyal 2014) as perceptually different. In line with the physical and spatial metaphors utilized by Schüll (2012) and Seaver (2018), the physical location of the meditation app on the smartphone becomes a critical means of realizing a promise (Ahmed 2010; Fortun 2008; Petersen and Krisjansen 2015; Sunder Rajan 2006; Thompson 2005). The app, by merely existing on the phone, creates a space where users can believe they are experiencing attention, mindfulness, and health. To take Headspace’s name literally, the meditation app creates a mental space by carving out a special digital space. Simply opening the app reinforces its anticipatory value—attending to its design is how attention happens by design, however flawed.
This article began by identifying a promise put forth by the meditation app sector I refer to as “attention by design,” which asserts that—when designed correctly—digital technology can have psychologically recuperative effects by building a capacity for attention rather than addiction. I demonstrated how attention by design is a promise unfulfilled. Meditation apps operate under the same logics and principles as addiction by design (Schüll 2012) and construct forms of attention that are ultimately profitable to the technology industry. By trying to discipline people’s digital “addictions” into a more mindful form of “attention,” the meditation app sector is capitalizing on the conceptual and material slippage between attention and addiction, which are culturally constructed through eerily similar techniques. Furthermore, attention by design is a promise that is impossible to fulfill as the affordances of the smartphone and its suite of digital tools capture attention in equal—if not greater—measure as meditation apps claim to give it back.
Rather than facilitating attention by design, meditation apps facilitate a promissory attention that helps people reinterpret their experiences as mindful, even when digital platforms ironically lure them into practices that are distracted and compulsive. This promissory attention—endlessly self-reinforcing itself by creating moments in which addiction can be overcome by paying attention—signals the expanding power of behavioral design, which not only changes how people behave but changes how people think and feel about their behavior. Unlike the data-driven technologies that have dominated scholarly inquiry into self-tracking (Nafus and Sherman 2014), quantified self (Schüll 2016), and wearable health technology (Viseu and Suchman 2010), meditation apps bring the promise of attention to fruition by the power of suggestion. They are at once a more complete realization of Foucault’s (1978) notion of governmentality, in which human agency is reduced through the internalization of discipline previously delivered through external technologies and techniques and a way to overcome governmentality by rethinking—as in the case of Rudra—what freedom and agency mean. The promise of attention by design is anticipatory, as shown in prior STS research (Fortun 2008; Petersen and Krisjansen 2015; Sunder Rajan 2006; Thompson 2005), but it is also, as Ahmed (2010) notes, affective, operating in the realm of feeling and belief. Future research on new digital health technologies, particularly apps that aim to impact mental experience, might tend further to how technology industry design and discourse impact people’s interpretation of their experiences—how they think and feel about thinking and feeling, and where and how this happens by design.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
I thank the people who shared their stories and experiences with me throughout this research. Listening to you made the work worthwhile. I am grateful to Nick Seaver and Tero Karppi for comments on an earlier version of this article and for helpful comments from two anonymous reviewers. Special thanks to the participants in the 4S 2019 Panel on Attention for creating a collegial forum and an ongoing conversation.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: UC Berkeley Center for Technology, Society, and Policy.
