Some Thoughts on ASMR

I’m sure a lot has been written about ASMR, but there doesn’t yet seem to be a consensus on what it is, precisely. The name, for one, is just pure nonsense - “Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response”. I highly recommend this NYT article about ASMR from April 2019 that goes more into detail about the history and present of these videos, and gives us this lovely quote:

”The YouTube subculture is bonded not by belief but rather by an ineffable sensation — perhaps the first time the internet has revealed the existence of a new feeling.”

Many ASMR videos have millions and millions of views. I’m sure a lot of people play them while they sleep, so not everyone actually watches while the video plays. ASMR videos don’t make me sleepy, but I use them as sort of colourful, unpredictable background noise when trying to get something visual done, music feels too distracting and I can’t quite focus on listening to a podcast. I usually put on something ”slurpy” like this one:  

 

There’s different subgenres of videos. Some common ones are mouth-sound and whispering videos, roleplays, videos of just tapping and crinkling different objects (videos where only the person’s hands are in view) and videos of some kind of relaxing treatment done to someone else. The roleplays are usually videos of a situation where another person pays intense attention to you, the viewer. Different sort of nurse’s examinations and spa treatments and such are common.

It’s not that long ago though that there was a stigma about the whole thing. It was considered supremely cringy and embarrassing, and people would enjoy the videos in secret. In recent years the genre has achieved more of a mainstream status. There’s ASMR ads and celebrity interviews. Many people, like Gibi, actually make their living on YouTube by producing a steady stream of content. Apparently there's some Finnish 'ASMRtists' too but that just sounds way too distracting for me to listen to.

I think there’s a few different things to be taken from ASMR videos. Many ASMR videos tap on to some kind of primal need to be noticed and taken care of. I don’t know if it’s a sad state of affairs that people are now going to online videos to get the grooming we used to provide for each other, or if it’s a good thing that such needs are noticed to be important and taken care of in some way. Emotional labor of young women gets finally paid for - in ad revenue. Yay, another win for capitalism?

It’s still weird, somewhat cringy and embarrassing. I guess that’s a part of what makes the whole thing interesting to me. What is too intimate, what is too personal? A person wouldn’t blog about their porn viewing habits out of a sense of common decency, but there’s a lot about it that’s pretty similar… like the part about trying to put into words what sort of weird shit you want the Internet to show you next, then skipping through the video to see what sort of triggers it has to see if something works for you.

Is any need to physically feel good just as shameful as the need to get off? Should watching weird tingly videos of people tapping on different surfaces be left as a personal sort of guilty pleasure, only to be viewed and appreciated in private? Should we redefine the words ’social porn’? Is this degeneracy and unabashed hedonism a sign of the end times and approaching apocalypse? Is the Internet making everyone sad and lonely and unable to find comfort, love and meaningful relationships with real, physical, imperfect people? Is this the part where this blog post turns into yet another rant about how social media is ruining everything despite it having little to do with the subject matter?

 Shrug emoji.



Some random extrathoughts to maybe expand on later:

- how the word ’porn’ has taken on the meaning of ’high quality images’ at reddit, where weird little subreddits such as r/skyporn, r/ruralporn or even r/animalporn and r/humanporn contain high quality images (and absolutely no sex of any kind)

- parasocial relationships to creators

- now that ironic detachment has fallen out of style, what does ’guilty pleasure’ even mean anyway?