Michael Wesch, an assistant professor of cultural anthropology at Kansas State who teaches Mr. Park's digital-ethnography class, thinks something more is happening.
"Think about the anxiety of trying to impress a girl when you're young," Mr. Wesch says. These days the soft-spoken 34-year-old is a new-media rock star—called "the explainer" by Wired magazine and admired for videos on education and technology that have been viewed by millions—but it's easy to imagine him as an awkward high-school kid in Fairbury, Neb., anguishing over whether to ask out a girl. Teenage Romeos get very little practice at impressing girls, he said, because every time they get shot down, "that's one less girl in the pool." If you grow up where he did, the pool can be pretty tiny.