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Chasing Tingles
My teenage students let me in on the secret, strange world of ASMR.
The assignment involved naming someone you admire. This type of question, when asked of teenagers, often elicits a generic response, the latest store-bought flavour, a Post Malone, or a sort of Justin.
But this time something curious occurred: not that four separate students had chosen the same person, but that they had chosen someone so far off the pop culture radar that I was compelled to pause my lesson to investigate a possible phenomenon at work.
How were so many fourteen-year-olds, with no living memory of the ‘90s or much of the aughts, familiar with — let alone prepared to tap as their pick for ‘admirable person’ — the gentle-natured Bob Ross?
What could explain this fascination for the quirky public television landscape painter? Were my students being ironic? (Had they discovered irony?)
Turns out teens love him. So how to explain the Bob Ross gloss?
I decided to find out. I called these outliers to the blackboard where I’d scrawled BOB ROSS. They were unimpressed by the coincidence I’d uncovered. Still, they seemed bemused by my enthusiasm and were at least temporarily willing to humour me before re-submerging into the infinite scroll of their Instagram feeds.
