Scientific Symbol, Individualistic Spirituality, and the Digital Age: An exploration into the alpha waves videos

Secularization theory often views religion and science as two self-evident, incompatible domains. Habermas's post-secularity maintains a religion-science reconcilement (2008), but the idea remains a binary conception. This research surveys the nuanced relationship between science and religion in communication on the belief/knowledge system and technology-mediated engagement by analyzing "alpha waves videos," a New Age spiritual content with a "scientific symbol" on YouTube. Inspired by grounded theory method, a convenience sample of 150 videos and two focused analysis samples of sizes 12 and 16, are collected and analyzed to give a comprehensive view of the videos. The spiritual healing music videos, though using "scientific" visual elements, audios, and languages to describe alpha waves, does not regard the alpha waves as distinct from ideas and practices of other origins. Intriguingly, although the adherents always engage in the studying activities of the application of alpha waves videos, no consensus has established on the definition of alpha waves, possibly suggesting that symbols tend to outweigh the meaning in significance. In addition, analysis on the video comments found a "simulated connection": With individualized spiritual practices and little interaction, the comment section develops mechanical solidarity of emotional significance. The findings highlight the values for further exploring individualistic spirituality in relation to theoretical elaboration of secularization and individualism.