The sound of silence
Imagine a world where people try to meet all their needs through a screen
Imagine a world where people shun the messy unpredictability of in-person interaction and try to meet all their human needs through a screen. The real world is too noisy, too busy, just too… much.
People wear earplugs to cancel out the hustle and bustle around them, or just the sounds of their housemates talking in the kitchen. When they yearn for comfort, they listen to the recorded, amplified sound of the heartbeat of someone they don’t know – bom-bom, bom-bom – straight into their headphones.
When they crave intimacy, they watch a video of someone they’ve never met pretending to comb their hair, listening to them whispering in their ear, telling them how kind they are, what a good friend they’ve been.
Sometimes, recalling the familial closeness of their mother licking her finger and wiping jam off their face, they watch a video where the presenter ‘paints’ with their spit on the camera. Rolling out pastry themselves is too messy, and they’re not going to see anyone they can share home-made biscuits with anyway, they’d rather watch someone else’s fingers pressing into a mound of sparkly, brightly coloured slime, enjoying every squash and squidge the microphone picks up.
There’s no scent. No touch. And there’s no need to worry about doing something embarrassing, or feeling vulnerable, or having to react to an unforeseen turn of events. There’s no mess, nothing to clean up.
There’s no risk.
Just imagine.
Now watch these videos
(sound on)
30 seconds of slime
Hair play: “It’s so silky smooth”
Affirmations: “The intense anxiety of daily life”
A step even closer
How do these videos make you feel?
If you’re under about 35, you may well have seen videos like this – known as ASMR – before, and you might have enjoyed them. Perhaps you found them satisfying or calming. Maybe you like to listen to them before you go to sleep.
If you’re over 45 or so, the chances are you haven’t seen anything like them before – and perhaps you found them weird, baffling, or even uncomfortable to watch.
So far, so normal – we all know that what we see on social media differs from what the next person sees, and it’s hardly news that younger and older people enjoy different content and cultural reference points.
But, in the course of our social research, much of which explores people’s digital experiences, we increasingly began to come across young people who were watching or talking about these ASMR videos.
It’s not a niche interest. We could see there were thousands of videos labelled as ASMR on YouTube, TikTok and other platforms, some with more than 200 million views. In 2023, ASMR was the most searched term on YouTube, advertisers have been experimenting with incorporating ASMR for several years, and it is sometimes spoofed in the mainstream.
It seemed curious that something so popular, and yet quite strange, was not being more widely commented on, so we decided to carry out our own research into the phenomenon and its appeal.
As we explored more of these videos ourselves, we began to wonder if the reasons young people were seeking out and watching them ran deeper than merely following the latest trend, or setting themselves apart from preceding generations.
We began to wonder if they represented a digital response to fundamental human needs – needs that previously would have been met through embodied experiences – messy play, enjoyment of nature, expressions of friendship, familial bonding – all over the world and for thousands of years.
And we began to consider what the implications of that might be – whether there might be risks or downsides of seeking to meet these needs in the digital realm.
Understanding ASMR’s appeal
Over the last few months, we’ve been exploring the reasons behind people’s enjoyment of ASMR. We have watched and mapped ASMR videos, interviewed viewers and creators, and collected data to begin to analyse patterns in who watches these videos and what they gain from the experience.
It’s clear that younger people see ASMR videos much more than older people, and they are certainly more likely to enjoy them. For example, almost half the 18-24-year-olds we surveyed said they often come across videos like the slime squishing video you just watched, compared with less than a fifth of those aged 45-54. Asked whether they enjoyed that video, 44% of the younger age group said they did, while just 11% of the older age-group said so. We got similar results for all four of the videos we showed them (the same ones you watched) – younger people came across them more often, and enjoyed them much more.
We’ve turned to psychological and evolutionary theories to consider why ASMR videos resonate so strongly with some people. When you watch ASMR videos, there are striking parallels between ASMR triggers and our fundamental human needs for comfort, connection, and sensory stimulation. Our interviews suggest that people are often drawn to this content when they feel lonely, fidgety or in need of comfort.
“It's hard to put into words, it’s just viscerally calming”
Ellie, 20
Our long-evolved human needs might explain ASMR’s appeal, but do these videos truly satisfy them? Does ASMR provide a genuine substitute for real-life connection and intimacy?
This project aims to explore these questions and themes, combining our research findings with broader data on societal trends and potentially relevant theories.
Taken together, they raise questions about the balances we seek to strike as humans between protection and exposure, comfort and risk, intimacy and vulnerability – and whether by increasingly turning to the digital realm to satisfy our needs we might be creating difficulties for ourselves in the physical world.
It’s these questions we are sharing here – to spark a conversation, to potentially join some dots, and to begin to think about what the findings and our analysis suggest about the wider future of media.
Summary
In the course of our recent research, we came across more and more younger people who were watching ASMR videos
We wondered if they were a digital response to human needs – for messy play, connection, comfort and intimacy – that would previously have been met through embodied experiences.
So we set out to explore the reasons why people were watching ASMR videos – what they were drawn to, why they enjoyed them, what they got out of them.
We watched ASMR videos, interviewed their creators and viewers, and collected data to analyse patterns in who watches, and what they gained from the experience.
Read chapter 2: Visceral videos
How we came to be interested in ASMR, and the research we conducted to explore it
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Get in touch
If you have any questions or would like to talk to us about this work, feel free to email: damon.deionno@revealingreality.co.uk to speak with the research team.
+44 (0)20 7735 8040
The Ballroom, Maritime House, Grafton Square, SW4 0JW
September 2024