askchapo

I honestly can't think of anything off the top of my head. There's plenty that I personally wouldn't indulge in, but just understanding why younger people like a particular trend isn't that hard. If anything, it's older people not understanding a particular trend that makes me baffled. Stuff like not understanding skibidi toilet (it's just gmod + body horror), not understanding Tiktok (if you can understand the appeal of dancing badgers with music being played in the background, you can understand the appeal of Tiktok), not understand streamers (if you can understand why people would football on TV or why people follow celebrity gossip, you can understand streamers). To go over your examples:

1. ASMR: It's just a particular genre of Youtube video. Genres can be quite specific. I personally like the genre of video where you watch a timelapse video of a plant growing from a seed. I think ASMR got popular because you don't have to actually watch the video since it's all audio. So, you can just treat the video like a podcast while doing chores or studying.

2. Instagram: It's just a social media site that grew large enough, and once a social media site is large enough, people will go to it no matter how much of a dumpster fire it is (see Facebook, Reddit, and LinkedIn). I mostly see Instagram as taking the photo part of Facebook and turning that into its own thing. There are people with 10000+ photos on Facebook, so why not create a social media site specifically catering to those people? We already have imageboards like 4chan, so the idea of a social media site centered on images is nothing new.

3. My students' taste in anime: I mean, Azumanga Daioh aired in Japan 5 years before they were born. Like, it predates Lucky Star and K-On. If you showed me those GI Joe cartoons from the 80s when I was a teenager, I would've given you a similar response. It's also an awkward time period where it's too old for me to enjoy as a kid but too new for my parents to enjoy when they're kids. If you showed me The Adams Family or some other boomer show when I was a teen, you would've at least gotten a "oh yeah, my parents showed me these before, and I thought they were pretty cool." There's a decent chance you would get a flash of familiarity if you showed them Transformers or GI Joe since their parents (or at least their dads) probably watched them.

4. Photo and videos done in portrait mode: It's just a stamp of authenticity and immediacy that translates to an aesthetic. Awhile back, there was a trend on Tiktok poking fun at how millennials start videos with this 5 second awkward pause while zoomers start videos by fumbling their phones. Even though they're very different on the surface, they're ultimately both trying to convey the idea that the video isn't edited but something that spontaneously happened. The millennial video has that 5 second pause to communicate that it was done unscripted with a single take, so I have to gather my thoughts for 5 seconds. The zoomer video has the fumble to communicate how I spontaneously wanted to create this video out of the blue. To loop back to portrait mode, if you take out your phone from your pocket, you're already holding it in portrait mode, so shooting the video in portrait mode is to communicate, "oh my God, I just have to shoot the video. I don't have time to flip the phone to portrait mode. I have to shoot it now." Eventually, it just becomes its own aesthetic just like how Unregistered HyperCam 2 became an aesthetic for certain early Youtube videos.

I just want to say that I love the lingo that they have come up with. It's very funny to me.

My students' taste in anime. I try to be all cool and show off my cool taste in anime, maybe drop a Azumanga Daioh clip. It's all ancient history for 17 year olds.

I'm Gen Z and I watched Azumanga Daioh when I was 17, it was my second ever anime!...

...What do you mean Azumanga Daioh is now older than every 17 year old alive today...? Nyoro~n.

Photo and videos done in portrait mode. I guess I don't watch videos on the go.

Honestly honestly mood though

I understand parasocial relationships and the feeling of community that comes with watching streamers, but when it's a stream with a large amount of folks and there's just a flurry of a chat it gives me anxiety I have no idea how they enjoy typing into that setting or what they're seeing

Watching the emojis fly by I feel like I am Neo seeing the Matrix code for the first time. nothing makes sense to me but I can tell something is going on

ASMR =/= whispering and crinkling wrappers. You ever listen to a song that makes you tingle at the base of your skull? that's ASMR some people just get it from weird noises. Some people get it from doing stuff. I learned to do it on command. There are certain schools of meditation where expanding that feeling into every moment of life is the goal. There's a song by Wilco "less than you think" which is about it and its a really good trigger.

Not sure how widespread it is but I see a lot of younger women complain about this so I assume there’s a shift: young people being way more lackadaisical about using condoms these days, especially for casual hookups. Obviously HIV isn’t the death sentence it once was, but it’s still there and it’s not the only STD with long term consequences. Yet there seems like an attitude of “Well she is (or I am) on hormonal birth control so there’s no concern then.”

I'm wildly out of date with all sorts of social media. I made the cognitive choice to not make any accounts on MySpace or Facebook when they came out and were gaining widespread popularity and I've been left in the prehistoric ages ever since. Hell I didn't even have a smartphone until like 2016.

I don't get phone selfie filters. Maybe that's more of a me thing because I hate getting my picture taken, but I really don't get the appeal.

I also don't understand why kids, this one's more aimed at parents, are being raised with phones in their hands when they can't even use the bathroom by themselves.

There’s an entire piece of at home technology that used to exist and tons of people used to have that I don’t think anybody under the age of 25 has ever actually seen: The VHS rewinder.

need to start putting photos on dating sites, as all pics of me in my phone are me squeezing carrots in my nostrils and similarly goofy things

I don't use dating sites, but if I did I'd definitely message the person with goofy pics like this instead of fake bs

My students' taste in anime. I try to be all cool and show off my cool taste in anime, maybe drop a Azumanga Daioh clip. It's all ancient history for 17 year olds.

I'm in the field of "not interacting with teenage kids," but probably watching some more recent stuff can help with that. While there's a lot of trash, there's some goodies from the last few years - Bocchi the Rock and Brave Bang Bravern are among my recent favorites. No idea if kids are actually watching these shows, but they're at least not prehistoric lmao.

Edit: and I say this as a person who has been binging on 70s anime for the past few months

Honestly feel that the newest generation has a majority of their numbers knowing how fucked the US is both currently and from a historical perspective (leftist tiktok is a big thanks to this). I do feel that there's some differences in consumption such as entertainment that boomer corporate suits do not at all comprehend (I was in highschool when markiplier began and you had streamers making boatloads of cash) that is interesting in a comical way like FB trying to monetize shit already invented like VR chatrooms but within a proprietary environment but not understanding that kids both don't have the money for that nor the inclination to be bound to it compared to buying cheaper VR headsets and settling for 3rd party and open source stuff.

I genuinely think pop/rap/rock was all better before circa 2008 and this is material rather than preference. The rise of the computer and social media changed the way music was made and understood. Rappers and electronic are worse at sampling, new artists overproduce without the skills of the insane studio producers in the 70s and 80s.

lol, i am in my 40s and i get ASMR. big time. i remember stumbling across a community a long time ago and immediately recognizing the fumbling attempts to describe the sensation, because it's not universal and i had once tried to explain it before as a teenager and failed, embarrassingly. also, some people have certain "triggers" that others don't, or are less reliable. and sometimes the triggers are less about the action and more about the memory connecting to an earlier experience.

in those early days it was about finding/sharing videos online that gave the sensitive viewer the sensation... which is sort of like transfixing or mesmerizing. my first experience that i recall was IRL as a 1st grader when my desk neighbor was explaining a math problem to me that i already understood. just sort of quietly talking while tapping / scratching their pencil lightly. it was like being caught in something, but pleasant. another time IRL i was in a meeting with this guy who was like late 50s and he had this meandering style of speech with a low voice. same deal, i was just kind of there, locked in, and could have listened to him prattle on about literally nothing of consequence for hours. i could snap out of it, but i could feel myself not wanting to, even though the meeting was a huge waste of my time lol. i also remember getting it from watching some public access channel as a kid for a show where they did algebra on a whiteboard for some local community college. and one where they taught conversational french that was recorded in the early 80s, when they would go over conjugation. super-chouette!

the way the phenomenon has exploded i attribute to monetization, because in those early days of people looking for videos they were all these like random clips of unintentional stuff. like a guy demonstrating a suit fitting, or a transferred VHS recorded lecture on body posture. so like some youtube channel for a very niche audience would have like 15-50 views on their dozen or so videos and then one that would have like 3.2 million views lmao. and frankly, if i just search ASMR on youtube, like >95% of the content is way off the mark. like annoying, weird etc. some up close face making mouth sounds.

it's really only probably something like 1% that hits it, and usually it's not content that is made to produce ASMR. this has been recognized broadly by us ASMR enjoyers and there are entire communities that chase and curate collections of "unintentional ASMR", which honestly has a better track record in my experience.

though, there are exceptions: content makers who seem to know they are giving off the whammy and how they are doing it, but they tend to be associated with the "fascination" and "mesmerism" community which is more adjacent to weird hypnotist stuff and those grifts.