Let Us Say What We Mean: Towards Operational Definitions for Techno-Spirituality Research

摘要

Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in HCI research on the use of technology in spiritual practices and environments. Some of these works cover spiritual/transcendent experiences associated with these contexts, but strikingly few of them describe in any way the experiences they studied or aimed to support, let alone give definitions of the terms they use for those experiences. Even fewer papers cite any literature on the relevant experiences. We have to ask: How do the authors understand the experiences their work is aiming to observe, invite, or support? How do they know when and whether they have observed, invited, or supported the kinds of experiences they target? How do they know what they are studying? This paper discusses the presence and absence of definitions of terms for spiritual/transcendent experiences in HCI research, and of citations of relevant literature. It speculates about possible reasons for the oversight, proposes some definitions aimed at filling the gap, and suggests an approach to operationalizing some of the proposed definitions.