“TikTok Is One Long Conversation With the Universe”: How Platform Affordances Shape Emerging Spirituality Across TikTok Manifestation Content

Abstract

After a surge in popularity during the pandemic in 2020, the allures of manifestation—the ability to summon one’s desires through positive thinking—have captured the public imagination and found fertile soil and a voracious audience on TikTok. This research uncovers themes across manifestation content on TikTok to reveal how platform affordances are becoming enmeshed with the performance of spiritual beliefs. This analysis finds several key characteristics of manifestation content that represent the intertwining of TikTok’s features with this spiritual practice: ritualized interaction, collapsing temporalities, visibility as spiritual empowerment, and a spiritual algorithmic imaginary. I argue that this entangling of the practice of manifestation with platform logics results in an ambivalent spirituality that appeals simultaneously to the complete transcendence of institutionalized religion while also being inextricably bound up in the commercial logics of the platform.