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Paper short abstract

This paper traces how users navigate tensions between curating a visible, aspirational spiritual self on devotional platforms and the lived, embodied reality of commitment (daily practice, affective investment, moral transformation).

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how Hindu devotional app users curate and maintain their religious identities through the onlife—the conflated digital–offline condition where distinguishing “online” from “offline” practice becomes challenging. Drawing on Luciano Floridi’s concept of the onlife and Birgit Meyer’s theory of sensorial forms, I argue that devotional apps function as aesthetically-tuned sensorial forms that modulate practitioners into modes of becoming devoted, where the boundary between religious performance and religious becoming dissolves and collapses.

Sensorial forms are structured aesthetic and affective repertoires that organise access to the sacred and shape practitioners as religious subjects. When embedded in digital environments, these forms—audio mantras, guided rituals, responsive visual feedback, haptic notifications, algorithmic ritual sequencing—create sensory regimes that attune practitioners to particular devotional aesthetics. However, the onlife condition intensifies this: practitioners do not perform devotion through an app or practice “really” offline. Instead, they simultaneously perform and become. The app mediates an aspirational spiritual self that, through repeated sensorial engagement, gradually constitutes actual spiritual identity.

This paper traces how users navigate tensions between curating a visible, aspirational spiritual self on devotional platforms and the lived, embodied reality of commitment (daily practice, affective investment, moral transformation). Drawing on ethnographic and app-interface analysis of Hindu devotional mobile applications, I demonstrate how the onlife dissolves these categories: apps do not merely stage performances of piety but cultivate the conditions under which becoming a devoted practitioner unfolds, collapsing the distinction between aspiration and actualisation.