The ambiguity of technology in ASMR experiences: Four types of intimacies and struggles in the user comments on YouTube

Autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) is a physiological response and multisensory phenomenon in which auditory and visual stimuli cause a relaxing, tingling, static-like sensation across the scalp, back of the neck, and sometimes other areas (Barratt & Davis, 2015). ASMR can be triggered in daily life, for instance by soft sounds, relaxing voices, light touch, massage, or physical grooming; but, 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. The most popular ASMR triggers include whispering, personal attention, crisp sounds, and slow movements (Barratt & Davis, 2015). ASMR culture today centres on YouTube (Gallagher, 2018), and new ASMR videos are uploaded daily and include everything from sound assortment videos with auditory triggers to point-of-view (POV) role-play videos, in which everyday activities (like going to the doctor's office or getting a massage) are reenacted and performed in a sonically and visually close-up, amplified ASMR manner.

Technologically mediated ASMR is part of the turn towards therapeutic tools, or self-medicating media, and is thus also part of the mindfulness movement (Fredborg et al., 2018; Gallagher, 2016; Nathoo, 2016), along with meditation apps and playlists offering soothing sounds and tranquil narratives in order to make the users relax and fall asleep. Studies have shown that despite the soothing qualities of ASMR, the ASMR community frequently struggles with the use of the technology involved (Klausen, 2016). However, the term “struggle” can be understood as a dual concept in this regard. This article could just as easily have explored the struggles that ASMR users have when turning to technology and seeking out ASMR videos on YouTube in order to feel better when struggling to fall asleep or feeling lonely, depressed, or anxious (Barratt & Davis, 2015; Poerio, 2016; Poerio et al., 2018). However, in this article, I discuss the struggles that can arise after the users have plugged in their headphones and typed in “ASMR” in YouTube's search bar. ASMR videos are built upon “a technological assemblage that may include complex configurations of specialized microphones, high-definition cameras […] computer software, telecommunication cables, radio signals, laptops, phones, tablets, headphones, and more” (Waldron, 2017: para. 3). The very construct of ASMR videos is thus inherently intertwined with and fully dependent on technology. Essentially, ASMR videos – and particularly role-play videos – seek to establish a form of intimacy, presence, and parasocial interaction through technology. However, this is not always accomplished, as we will see in some of the user comments later. In particular, some users struggle with technology and are reminded of the (nonworking or flawed) mediation of ASMR when watching a video on YouTube, while others struggle to uphold a willing suspension of disbelief.

I define struggle not as a way of fighting or resisting, but rather as a way “to experience difficulty and make a very great effort in order to do something” (Cambridge Dictionary, 2021b). In this definition lies an ambiguity. Struggling in terms of experiencing ASMR is thus understood not as a question of either–or. I am not interested in whether or not ASMR causes struggling – rather, I am interested in the ambiguous nuances that are at play in experiencing ASMR through mediation.

(Research on) ASMR – as a mediated, yet bodily phenomenon – taps into a developing field of embodiment-based mediation research, which is prevalent across social sciences, cultural studies, psychology, and media studies. Academic work within the latter include, amongst others, Vivian Sobchack's (2004) Carnal Thoughts – Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, in which Sobchack shows how our experience always emerges through our senses. More recently, Meg-John Barker, Rosalind Gill, and Laura Harvey (2018) have explored how our intimate lives are shaped through different media in the book Mediated Intimacy: Sex Advice in Media Culture, and the anthology Mediated Intimacies – Connectivities, Relationalities and Proximities (Andreassen et al., 2019) showed how social media construct new types of intimacies.

In this article, I explore the ambiguity of technology 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. A secondary goal of this study is to add to the existing limited body of knowledge regarding ASMR, mediation, and intimacy, and especially research dealing with the struggling aspects of technologically mediated ASMR (Andersen, 2015; Bennett, 2016; Harper, 2020; Manon, 2018; Poerio, 2016; Smith & Snider, 2019; Waldron, 2017).

Traditionally, intimacies have been associated with physical proximity, familiarity, privileged knowledge, emotional attachments, trust, and a form of closeness (Jamieson, 2013; Zelizer, 2005). According to the Cambridge Dictionary (2021a), the quality or condition of being intimate correspondingly includes three different meanings: physical, informational, and emotional. In mediated intimacies, there are constructions of intimacy in situations in which individuals not familiar with one another, and across distances, create feelings of intimacy and engage in intimate practices with one another (Andreassen et al., 2018).

ASMR videos – and especially ASMR role-play videos – take on the aesthetics of intimacy; what intimacy usually looks like, sounds like, and feels like in terms of several of the above-mentioned traditional ways of viewing intimacies, but in a mediated form. One could argue that ASMR videos establish a distant intimacy, an experience of intimacy in the absence of normal definitions of physical proximity (Andersen, 2015), through visual and auditory proximity, immediacy, and embodied animating.

More than 60 years ago, sociologists Donald Horton and Richard Wohl coined the term parasocial interactions to describe the illusion of face-to-face relationships between a performer on television and the audience – a kind of intimacy at distance. In 1956, they wrote: “We call [the illusion of intimacy in parasocial relationships] an illusion because the relationship between the persona and any member of his audience is inevitably one-sided, and reciprocity between the two can only be suggested” (Horton & Wohl, 1956: 217). John B. Thompson later called the mediated quasi-interaction that is relatively open-ended and predominantly monological, but constituting a form of interaction that creates distinctive kinds of interpersonal relationships, “non-reciprocal intimacy at a distance” (Thompson, 2005: 33–34). This is true of technologically mediated ASMR as well. Watching and listening to ASMR on YouTube “entails no actual touch; all participants are, in reality, alone” (Ahuja, 2013: 445). Most often, ASMR is recorded and consumed asynchronously in a two-dimensional audiovisual format. Even so, there is a continuous theme of intimacy intrinsically tied to ASMR (Andersen, 2015; Klausen, 2019; Waldron, 2017).

As mentioned above, I explore in this article the ambiguity of technology in relation to the ASMR experience and theoretically investigate how a viewer-listener might struggle to obtain an intimate and parasocial interaction in a technologically mediated ASMR context. ASMR is a mediated phenomenon, a bodily and emotional response, and it is interesting to explore how this potential ambiguity is framed linguistically by some of its users in their comments. Based on prior empirical field research rooted in ethnographic, inductive methods inspired by grounded theory (Klausen, 2016), this article takes over where previous research left off. In the previous study (Klausen, 2016), 64 pages of screenshots of user comments on YouTube and Reddit were collected, and four categories stood out from the sample of linguistic framings provided by the users. One of these categories was called “mediated modes of expression” and consisted of comments concerning the technology through which ASMR was mediated. The majority of these comments were about the ways that technology helped to create an intimate encounter with the ASMRtist despite the mediation, although only when users attuned themselves to ASMR – a reservation which caused some users to struggle. What informed the starting point of this current article was thus the challenges that were found within the category of mediated modes of expression from the 2016 study, which has sensitised me (Blumer, 1969) to look at comments using the concept of struggling as an analytical lens.

In this article, I draw on theoretical thematic analysis (inspired by Braun & Clark, 2006) in interpreting symbolic constructions of social and cultural meanings – similar to Stuart Hall's (1997) notion of cultural representation – that have to do with the theme of struggling. The comments included in this article have been collected deductively using an unobtrusive, or non-reactive, observation method. What has guided me towards finding the illustrative comments has been the overall theme of struggling in relation to the four types of intimacies introduced above, as what users often struggle with is obtaining one (or more) of these intimacies.

I am aware that comments online have limitations in terms of enunciation, both empirically and ethically. First, online material like YouTube comments is text-based, and the comments are limited in terms of the communicative clues that are present in face-to-face situations, such as body language, intonation, and facial expressions, as well as context and situation of use. In comments, only the actual textual message, along with the use of emojis and textual expressions of emotions, actions or the like, is available. Second, I only have access to the digital footprints of active users leaving behind a comment – and thus not to the majority of users, who only view and listen to ASMR content without leaving behind a visible data trace. This explains the necessity of calling the users making comments presented in this article “pacesetting power users of ASMR”. Third, most users on YouTube post anonymously (or under a pseudonym in the form of a username), giving rise to issues of authenticity (as discussed by Kozinets, 2010). However, regarding the latter, it should be noted that I am not concerned with whether the comments posted constitute an authentic textual transmission of the ASMR experience. Rather, I consider these comments to be an ineluctable part of the multimodal phenomenon that ASMR is; comprised of not only audiovisual material (videos), but also textual elements (comments), algorithmic options (suggested videos), and interactive calls for action (like, share, subscribe). Along with the other elements, the comments are part of what users are presented with when they seek out ASMR content on YouTube.

I have chosen to apply situational ethics and have focused on reasoned considerations regarding the specific situation (Tracy, 2013). More specifically, this includes careful consideration of the fact that the comments used in this study are publicly available and written under pseudonyms (YouTube usernames), with no personally sensitive information tied to either the username or the comment itself. In addition, with regard to levels of vulnerability, harm, and rights (Markham & Buchanan, 2012), I have assessed the comments one by one and found them to be not compromising for the users.

In this section, I return to the four types of intimacies introduced above. Situating and contextualising comments gathered for this study, I analyse and discuss theoretical concepts of immediacy, telepresence, willing suspension of disbelief, and imagining – while returning to the notion of parasocial interaction and the question of how technology can be ambiguous in the case of technologically mediated ASMR. I am aware that introducing major additional theoretical concepts here calls for elaborate discussions for which there is no room in this article. I have decided to refer to the concepts briefly in a deliberately peripheral way (for more elaborate discussions of the notions of immediacy and telepresence, see Klausen, 2016, 2019; Klausen & Have, 2019).

I have analysed comments that relate to the four types of intimacies – and struggles to create them – that are most often at play in ASMR role-play videos. However, when talking about intimacy – whether it be spatial, temporal, embodied, or social – some questions arise: What or whom are these intimacies directed towards – the ASMR user or their devices? And how can technology be seen as ambiguous in this regard? On the one hand, as noted previously, (mediated) intimacy is encouraged by using techniques such as binaural sonic recording and visual close-ups as well as role-play narratives that remind users of real-life experiences, which are usually associated with physical touch. On the other hand, one could argue that no matter how parahaptic the ASMR experience might feel, there is no way to escape the physical distance and temporal displacement involved in the situation.

With regard to the latter, Hugh S. Manon (2018: 232) argues that ASMR emphasises a pseudo-interactivity delivering a constant reminder of “its own status as ersatz attainment”. Manon thus questions whether the ASMR users in the comments actually feel cared for, despite what they say, because this care is always directed towards an object. “It is not actual consistent care”, Manon argues, “that ASMR aims to produce, but instead a self-evidently artificial going-through-the-motions of what care is supposed to look and sound like” (Manon, 2018: 237). Emma Bennett (2016: 133) agrees with Manon to some extent in stating that the performance of care “is directed towards this hardware, these devices”. Emma Waldron (2017) also questions whether the intimacy in ASMR videos is in fact directed just as much towards the medium as the user, making the intimacy of ASMR videos deeply imbricated with the technological medium itself.

We normally feel that intimacy requires the close proximity of others and close connections involving friendship or personal knowledge. By contrast, ASMR videos offer only mediated proximity and one-way communication by virtue of the pre-recorded video format. The intimacy is, in more than one sense, mediated. However, as Waldron (2017) also argues, mediation does not necessarily imply inauthenticity. In fact, intimacy can be established despite the absence of some of the components that we usually associate with being intimate, as illustrated in the comments above. The lack of social and corporeal copresence even seems to be essential to the technologically mediated ASMR experience, as it “allows viewers to relax into the sounds offered by ASMR without having to account for, or navigate, social interactions” (Smith & Snider, 2019: 5). The ASMR experience is not like going to get a massage, because the viewer is not obliged to socially interact with the person in front of them on the screen. The user is thus free from the struggles that might accompany physical and social interaction; a struggle that is nonexistent in technologically mediated ASMR.

Horton and Wohl's (1956: 215) notion of parasocial interactions and Thompson's nonreciprocal intimacy at a distance are often characterised by “no sense of obligation, effort, or responsibility on the part of the spectator” – just as the previously mentioned quote from Smith and Snider suggests. The absence of a sense of obligation might seem to logically prevent the establishment of intimacy in ASMR experiences, as the spectator (ASMR user) is not committing themselves reciprocally to the situation. However, Horton and Wohl (1956: 215) continue, “if he [the spectator] remains involved, these parasocial relations provide a framework within which much may be added by fantasy”, which brings us back to the point about users having to play along and use their imagination if ASMR is to work fully and if tingles are to be triggered.

In this article, I have explored the ambiguous role that technology plays in relation to the ASMR experience, and have sought to theoretically investigate how viewer-listeners might struggle to obtain an intimate and parasocial interaction in a technologically mediated ASMR context. I have introduced a classification of four types of intimacies: spatial, temporal, social, and embodied (inspired by Berryman & Kavka, 2017), using these as theoretical categories – along with the overall theme of struggling, with which I have carried out a theoretical, thematic analysis of selected user comments. The illustrative comments have been discussed in relation to theoretical concepts of mediated intimacy, immediacy, and parasocial interaction.

ASMR role-play videos seem highly reliant on several conditions when trying to create intimacy and establish a feeling of (co)presence. The users in the comments might be aware that the actions performed in the videos are mediated (there) and recorded (then), yet the tingles are very much an embodied, visceral (here), and live (now) experience. In order to intertwine them, two groups of conditions are particularly relevant. First, there are the “here and now” aspects in the form of spatial and temporal intimacies, including the (a)liveness of the voice and techniques such as binaural recording and 3D and VR visuals that create parahaptic interactions and telepresence (the media-enabled feelings of being touched and sharing a physical, emotional space). Second, there is the social intimacy in the shape of the linguistic and social blank space that is created so the users can insert themselves in the video through direct addressing and embodied animating to feel more immersed and interactively included.

However, the user must often trust the ASMRtist with turned-up volume (to be able to hear the close-up sounds) and imagination (by honouring the contract of fiction) in order to get the tingles. Faulty or disruptive technology – for instance loud ads or broken equipment – may cause users to struggle and remind them of the deep imbrication of body and devices. Nevertheless, if users are able to go along with the situation, the result is a performative intimacy that can be defined as a form of parasocial interaction in providing effortless and one-way communication, yet managing to establish a soothing, social, and embodied intimacy at a distance. The user feels seen, heard and even touched (emotionally as well as physically) – despite mediation – through empathy, imagination, embodiment, and a willing suspension of disbelief.