Now You’ve Got the Shiveries

The Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) or Whisper Community is an online group of people who create and share videos through YouTube videos that are intended to produce a relaxing shivering sensation for the viewer. ASMR relies primarily affective power of the whispered voice’s impression to create an intimate sonic space shared by the listener and the whisperer. The ASMR community struggles with popular perception of the transgressive nature of their shared pleasure, which by its public nature is what Berlant and Warner call “nonstandard intimacy.” In this paper, I investigate the ways in which the whisper works on the viewer through YouTube, drawing on sonic associations between private domestic space and care, as well as the problematic distance of the YouTube-mediated intimate experience that troubles the Whisper Community’s pursuit of pleasure.