Aligning with a sociotechnical order through the mundane: on the spread of the brainwave device MC Square in Korean students’ study culture in the 1990s

Amid increasing competitions over higher education in the 1990s South Korea, a brainwave device called MC Square was introduced highlighting ‘a surprising “low brainwave” effect that cutting-edge science discovered.’ Originally developed in the U.S. as Mastermind Esprit for relaxation and meditation, the device was redesigned in South Korea as a tool for study. With cumulative sales of about 1.8 million units from 1991 to 1998, MC Square emerged as one of the most popular brainwave devices, becoming a mundane artifact embedded in students’ lives. Yet, making MC Square mundane required more than technically enabling seamless human-device interaction through deliberate interface design; nor was it simply the result of its widespread dissemination. Rather, the mundanisation of MC Square depended on its alignment with emerging orders. At stake were orders that privileged (1) universities over other education, (2) academic grades over other life values, (3) competition over cooperation, (4) technical devices over neurochemical drugs, (5) the brain as central in shaping behavior and mind, and (6) mothers as central in family care. This alignment, however, neither emerged nor persisted on its own. It was carefully woven and sustained through discursive and practical efforts, often in the name of care. In this context, care was one of the media through which individual brains, technologies, and social orders were brought into alignment, mundanising MC Square. A mundane technology, though not a site of authoritative knowledge production, is a revealing window onto the work and its meanings in the particular ordering of self, technology, and society.