Nye, David; Winner, Langdon (Utah State University)
Faculty Advisor: Edenfield, Avery (College of Humanities and Social Sciences, English Department)
The purpose of this research project is to examine the interplay between psychotherapeutic mobile applications, such as Calm and Headspace, and the people that use them. Using Langdon Winner and David Nye's discussions on technologies and the discourses surrounding them, I aim to synthesize the existing literature, which primarily investigates the effectiveness of these mobile technologies as forms of psychotherapy, with the concept of technology as an identity-forming tool. I hope to address how these psychotherapeutic technologies can both enable and disallow users, and how users, through their engagement with these mobile applications, are challenging prevailing definitions of psychotherapy and technology. Through a thorough analysis of current literature, together with Winner and Nye's work and my own evaluations of public online reviews of psychotherapeutic mobile applications, I intend to advance the research that considers how technologies affect people and how people affect technologies.