ASMR: bodily pleasure, online performance, digital modality

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See, for example, okaywhatever51838, “WEIRD SENSATION FEELS GOOD,” Steadyhealth.com, https://www.steadyhealth.com/topics/weird-sensation-feels-good, accessed 15 August 2019.

2. With this issue such a central problematic, work around ASMR easily resonates with current strands of media studies and sound studies theorising precisely this sonic-haptic traversal: crucially, scholarship surrounding the voice, from Steven Connor’s Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism to Pooja Rangan’s “The Skin of the Voice: Acousmatic Illusions, Ventriloquial Listening,” in the recent Sound Objects edited volume. An even more courageous instantiation is Tina Campt’s recent work, where the haptic realities of engaging with material interlocutors become the foundation for a sonic theory of reading visual images. See Connor (2000), Rangan (2019) and Campt (2017).

3. See Scott (2011) and McCracken (2015).

4. Life with MaK, YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC88Qzl8DnaiR0Pxadh56iQw, accessed 15 August 2019.

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Notes on contributors

Paula Clare Harper

Paula Clare Harper is a postdoctoral fellow at Washington University in St. Louis. Her research centres around music and sound and the internet, with attention to intersections of circulation, gender, fandom, and social media. She received her PhD from Columbia University in 2019, and her dissertation is entitled “Unmute This: Sound, Circulation, and Sociality in Viral Media.”