Use it or lose it

In this project, we set out to understand why people were watching ASMR, what they were getting from it. But we soon found ourselves asking not just what they were getting from it, but what they might be missing. We started to consider whether people were turning to ASMR videos to meet human needs they previously would have met offline – and that led us to further questions about whether it was truly meeting those needs, and whether there might be downsides in seeking to satisfy human needs in this way.

Coming across increasing numbers of young people seeking to meet their natural wish for comfort and connection, for tactile experiences and messy play, for intimacy and attention, through the exaggerated – but ultimately synthetic – audio and visual experiences that ASMR videos offer, is reminiscent to us of those previous observations. And, as in our previous work about the way smartphones shape our behaviour and our thinking, it’s valuable to reflect on what we can do to stave off the downsides.

Every time we choose to put on noise-cancelling headphones we are making a choice. Yes, they will screen out the noises we don’t want to hear in the moment, but what will they do to our ability to cope with noisy environments over the longer term?

If it is now normal for children to stay indoors, alone, with a screen for company instead of playing outside, isn’t it inevitable that they will seek to fulfil their desire to bond with others, to feel special in someone else’s eyes, through those same screens? What will that do to their ability to make ‘real’ friends? To have difficult conversations? To navigate the messiness of real-life intimacy?

While we’ve been exploring what might be driving young people to watch ASMR and considering what effect its ‘use’ could have, we’ve been noticing other trends too. How often do you hear or read words starting with ‘over’? Overwhelm, overload, overstimulation? Were these words always so central to people’s descriptions of their days, their experiences, their feelings? Is life really more overwhelming than it used to be, or, by opting out of its more abrasive aspects, are we simply reducing our ability to deal with them?

There are choices to be made here too – for the parents and teachers who directly influence young people’s interaction with technology and with the world; for the tech companies, product designers and content creators who determine what people of all ages are shown on their screens; for the advertisers and marketers who sell us these products; and for all of us, in determining and shaping what sort of society we want to live in.

The world we imagined at the start of this piece, in which atomised people try to meet all their human needs through a screen, shutting out the world, shunning real-life intimacy, sounded far-fetched, dystopian.

But if it’s not what we want, what can we do now, what choices can we make – as individuals, as parents, as a society – to make it less likely?