THE RISE OF ASMR
Members of the ASMR community have linked certain literary descriptions to their own experiences of ASMR, quoting from, amongst others, Virginia Woolf and Sylvia Plath. I found a more recent description reminiscent of ASMR in Stephen Kelman’s Pigeon English, which describes the sense of relaxation from watching a task being completed carefully:
I couldn’t concentrate because I wanted to see what Poppy was doing. She was painting her fingernails. She actually used the paint for pictures to paint her fingernails with. I watch her the whole time. I couldn’t even help it. She painted one fingernail green, and then the next one pink again, in a pattern. It took a very long time. She was very careful, she didn’t make a single mistake. It was very relaxing. It made me feel sleepy just watching it.[4]
Both literary descriptions such as these and anecdotal reports suggest that the experience currently described using the term ASMR is not ‘new’. It is, however, relatively new to the mainstream media and online community. The growing awareness of ASMR within popular culture has been largely due to YouTube, the online ASMR community (on various online forums such as Reddit), and ‘ASMRtists’ who create video content for people to induce ASMR. The first online descriptions of ASMR appeared on various forums (e.g. SteadyHealth.com and IsItNormal.com) from 2007 where people explained and discussed their ASMR experiences. In 2009, the first ASMR YouTube video was posted by WhisperingLife who, based on her own experience of relaxation through whispering, decided to create whisper videos for others to enjoy. The rise of YouTube videos was accompanied by a subreddit in 2011 called ‘ASMR. Sounds that feel good’.[5] Journalists soon noticed the growing online ASMR community and the first of many news articles on ASMR was published in 2012.[6]
Figure 15.2 shows the upsurge of interest in the term ‘ASMR’ using Google Trends.[7] Since 2011, interest in the topic has risen dramatically. As an example of the popularity of ASMR, the most prolific ASMRtist on YouTube (GentleWhispering) had, in June 2016, over 650,000 subscribers and her most popular video had over 15 million views. As these figures show, the interest in and widespread use of ASMR is not trivial. Simple whispering videos have evolved into realistic role-plays,[1] which
