ASMR and The Digital Body
Let me reach out and touch you. You’re going to feel a slight sensation just there, by your ear. As I pass my hands over your shoulders, let me know if the pressure is too much.
Welcome to your digital body, an untouchable thing about to be caressed online. We have had digital bodies since the early days of the internet–avatars and mascots were our digital doubles as we remade ourselves online. Think about the explosive popularity of the Sims, first released for Microsoft Windows in 2000. With every iteration of the game, the details of our digital bodies expanded–we were able to customize ourselves for accuracy or aspiration. What form would we take in a formless digital space? But as we develop more robust digital lives, the line between our physical bodies and our online lives is collapsing. Our online bodies are developing qualities previously reserved for our physical ones. Namely: sensation, touch, reciprocity.
ASMR is the online moniker for autonomous sensory meridian response, a loosely scientific name for the feelings aroused by certain sights and sounds online. Born in the early days of Youtube, the content has followed a familiar online arc. Beginning as an authentic niche, self-published videos from everyday amateurs found a community of like-minded viewers. Often drawing on nostalgia, many videos gestured to childhood games and the innocence of easy intimacy. Someone playing with your hair as you sat in class, or a friend drawing X’s on your back at recess. The first Google searches for “ASMR” occurred in 2011 and steadily grew until its peak in 2019. ASMR became popular, then viral, then commodified– but one thing remained the same. The content attempted to elicit physical sensation from an interaction with our digital bodies.
It’s not unheard of for us to react physically to non-physical media. You could make the argument that this is the objective of music, or poetry, or art writ large. But what is unique about ASMR’s effects is that they directly address–and in many ways construct–a digital body in a third place. It creates a body that is somehow in the physical space of the creator, in the physical space of the consumer, and in the digital ether between the two.
Let me show you what I mean:
An ASMR creator is brushing your hair. Maybe she’s the popular girl in the back of the classroom, maybe she’s giving you braids in a salon. Maybe there is no scenario, just an inviting background and the promise of touch. In many cases, she asks for your consent before she touches you. You cannot give it explicitly, of course, but you have given your implicit consent by seeking out and choosing the video. But that imagined reciprocity, an imagined interactiveness, begins to build out your digital body. She is asking your permission to touch you, an act which must have some kind of possible power or danger or healing, reified by her cautious approach.
And now, she comes towards you. She physically approaches the camera and her hands move out to make contact with “your” hair. Your hair is not there, of course. It might be thousands of miles away. But you feel something–some pleasure, some relaxation, some tingle. Her hands do make contact with your faraway hair, through a digital body that is acting as your analogue. There is often no visible avatar that represents “you” in the digital frame, but rather there is an invisible projection of your own body, now not just laying in bed or sitting in a coffee shop, but also projected out into a spaceless digital realm, where you can feel it being caressed.
The more fully constructed your digital body is, the more pleasure you can often feel. There is a popular trigger for ASMR where viewers seek “personal attention”--this is often executed as a detailed assessment of your body. The ASMR creator looks into the camera, i.e.: your eyes, and carefully observes every feature of your body. Maybe they shine a light over the skin on your face, moving the light to better see your cheeks or forehead. Or sometimes they stand back and gaze, making comments on the alignment of your hips or shoulders.
Your digital body begins to exist not just vaguely, but in detail. Maybe you map your own pain onto your digital body and sigh with relief as she “massages” your shoulders. Or maybe your digital body exists free from pain, a body without the burden of corporality. A small subset of ASMR takes on an erotic component and the creator moans in your ear, eliciting yet more physical sensation from your digital body.
What unites much of the content is intimacy. Connection, attention, closeness–these benefits are spelled out in ASMR titles and hashtags. What does it mean, as we sink deeper into our digital lives, that we are now seeking out what has historically been the providence of uniquely human, interpersonal experience through our digital bodies?
Is this the logical conclusion of the post-industrial age? Walter Benjamin was thinking about this as early as 1935. In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction he introduced the idea of an aura, the concept that art which is reproduced degrades an ineffable, essential quality of the original. That a copy of a copy of a copy withers, in some way, the thing it originally was. A video of touch, disseminated to millions of far-flung viewers, is somehow less touching than actual contact. Fast forward to 1980, however, and Roland Barthes is thinking about photography and what might remain of that essential core:
“The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star.”- Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida
What delayed rays touch us from a digital video of intimacy we have never physically experienced? What aura of authenticity withers as our digital bodies grow more and more robust? Does the connection that is captured in an ASMR video, the “referent” in Barthes’ terms, emanate outwards–caressing our digital bodies and by extension our real bodies?
Barthes wrote Camera Lucida partly out of grief for his dead mother. The photograph which he analyzes is one of her, she is “the missing being” whose rays touch him. It’s a uniquely human emotion, grief, and one with many physical symptoms. Pain, a heavy weight. And for Barthes, there is a kind of connection possible through an image, where that physical sensation boomerangs back. It’s almost as if he can touch her again.
Whether ASMR delivers “real” sensation seems besides the point. What it shows us is that our digital bodies are becoming more a part of our everyday life. It makes less and less sense to think about the differences between our physical and digital selves. Our lives are integrated, the digital components to our days are assumed.
Increasingly, we are seeking to access feelings previously reserved for interpersonal connection through those digital bodies. We can be touched, relaxed, aroused, diagnosed, caressed, and adjusted through our digital bodies. What remains to be seen is the ways this can wither the interactions we have in real life. The more we live online, the more our digital bodies are becoming as much our home as anything else. What do we lose when that happens? What happens when the more we reach out through the ether to touch our digital bodies, the more we can feel them touch us back?
Gillian Goodman is an NYC-based freelance journalist and writer. Her work has been featured in Truthout, Democracy Now!, and Prism Reports among others. She previously created and hosted Coastal Navigator—an election podcast for a local outlet in Savannah, which asked the big questions of the election through local voices.