Autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) is a tingling, static-like sensation in response to specific triggering audio and visual stimuli. Within recent years, ASMR has mostly been associated with videos on YouTube (technologically mediated ASMR) dedicated to make the users “tingle”, relax, and feel at ease. In this article, I explore the ambiguity of technology in relation to the ASMR experience and theoretically investigate how viewer-listeners might struggle to obtain an intimate and parasocial interaction in a technologically mediated ASMR context. The article introduces four types of intimacies as well as theoretical concepts of mediated intimacy, immediacy, and parasocial interaction, and I discuss these intimacies and concepts in relation to illustrative comments by some of the pacesetting power users of ASMR.

ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) is a physiological sensory reaction usually described as “a tingling, static-like sensation across the scalp, back of the neck and at times further areas in response to specific triggering audio and visual stimuli” (Barratt & Davis, 2015). In the last decade ASMR has also become a growing media cultural phenomenon, especially on YouTube, where ASMRtists create videos that help you overcome stress, loneliness and insomnia while making you feel good. This article follows a question raised by one of these ASMRtists concerning the ability of the videos to generate a feeling of human touch. In a combination of Media and Sound Studies, and supported by an empirical study of user comments on YouTube and Reddit, we argue that ASMR videos off er a social service by affording experiences of telepresence and pseudohaptic social audio-grooming and thereby meeting the ‘skin hunger’ of modern human beings.

No abstract

In this paper, I introduce and discuss technologically-mediated ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) in the form of role play videos. I suggest using haptic audio-visuality as a theoretical elaboration to describe a form of touching with the eyes and the ears through interpersonal triggers, direct address and directional touching. And I present ASMR role play videos as a category that can be viewed as both a shared pleasure and a personal experience. Despite its mediated — body-to-screen rather than body-to-body — and one-way format, research suggests that ASMR can be regarded as an intimate, present and interpersonal experience. ASMR has succeeded in integrating the viewer-listeners’ physical reality with virtuality and creating a perception of presence. What is missing, however, is a more in-depth exploration of how this perception of presence is created through the performative construction of a particular kind of attuned, imaginative and interactive viewer-listener within ASMR role play videos. This is what I intend to explore in this paper.

No abstract