After I first downloaded the Guru Meditation app, like many, I was skeptical of its effectiveness in real life meditation. Sure, it was a cute idea, using your iPhone or iPad to help you relax. It even made sense in some ways: people often treat their iPhones, iPads, and iPods as extensions of themselves and yet simeltaneously feel burdened by the constant technological pull that they experience when Facebook alerts and text messages beckon. Though, while using Guru Meditation, today's consumer can meditate with his or her Apple product in hand. This way, the technology becomes more like an extension of the human, a device required for meditation (considered by some to be something that should be a "pure" experience devoid of technological hubub, as many pointed out in class discussion), but at the same time, it can put a stop to the need to face text messages, phone calls, emails, Facebook updates, and Tweets because with Guru Meditation the medium through which we receive all of these updates is used to deliver us a break from the constant updates. When someone uses their iPhone to meditate, this means that they cannot be mediating with his/her iPhone in his/her pocket, vibrating everytime someone tries to contact him/her.
As Katherine Hayles puts it in the passage we read from How We Became Posthuman, as humanity shifts towards what she refers to as "posthuman" there becomes "no difference betweeen bodily existence and computer simulation...no difference robot teleology and human goals." If we have truly become posthuman, then there is no difference between using the body to achieve meditation and using the Guru Meditation app. Thus, it only makes sense that some users have come to regard their Apple products as extensions of themselves.
However, some still remain unconvinced of the magic of the app. In the post we read by Ian Bogost he refers to apps as a little more than "sweet nothings," comparing them to Tictacs and Ke$ha. Perhaps the best point that he makes in his post is the notion of "latertasking." Perhaps it is impossible to take apps such as Guru Meditation seriously because when using the app for meditation, one can easily snap out of meditation and log onto Twitter at his/her leisure. Though users may seem to be engrossed in Guru Meditation while staring at their iPads, Twitter, Facebook, and Angry Birds are always calling. Perhaps the "ease and comfort" of the app defy the very essence of meditation, which is meant to help people reach a deep state of relaxation. According to Bogost, "deep meaning seeps out of every unit [of the app]." While I feel that this accusation is unfair and slightly vague, I admit that I, too, have reservations about apps like Guru Meditation. While I tend to agree with the statement that "the human form--including human desire and all its external representations may be changing radically and thus must be reinvisioned," I still find myself unable to take apps such as Guru Meditation seriously. Perhaps this is because I am one of the few iPad users who feels that she would have no trouble surviving without an iPad. I am not comfortable regarding the iPad as an extension of myself; therefore, I am not comfortable using it to meditate.
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You set up a poignant conflict between technology as an extension of the self and technology as a burden on the self. So I wonder if, in the terms you argued for above, the Guru Meditation app couldn't be ironically read as a technological arbiter b/w the self and digital/social media. And yet this arbiter is itself prey to the constant "background noise" of apps in general... and what they, too, promise (be it meditation or lists upon lists of friends or angry birds). With this in mind, what does Bogost's claim to "deep meaning" really mean here, particularly set against his additional claim to apps being "sweet nothings"? And why, for example, are you determined to maintain the distinction b/w "myself" and "iPad"? Does the Guru app necessarily negate the body (or self) as a medium through which meditation is ultimately achieved? Or does the app simply call attention to our dependence on bodily meditation--to the fault of any technological apparati? Might the struggle you outline here be performing, in part, the process of becoming posthuman? Or perhaps the instinctual desire to fight against it? Might the Guru app be precisely that barrier (an arbiter, of sorts) to *prove*--even perhaps, improve, rather than disprove--the continued disconnect between ourselves and our "computer simulations"?
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