What I meant was that social obsessions come and go. They gradually rise in the national (media-driven) consciousness and then they HIT and everyone kowtows to them, and then something else (media-driven) gets everybody all upset or all engaged and that previous thing recedes to a sort of minor buzz that still commands some attention, but not as much as when it was “in.” It’s been this way forever. Or at least since mass media became a reality. Human nature (media-driven).
---------------------------------------------------------
I must respectfully disagree. In my view, popular culture is more like a ratchet, ever moving leftward and more degenerate. Every few years the ratchet moves rightward, but it does not change anything. Then the ratchet moves left again, moving the culture with it.
Just a few decades ago, no one envisioned that homosexual "couples" would be widely portrayed in a positive light on prime-time television, and that advertisers would be enthusiastically supportive of such programming.
Further, no one would have envisioned that a general manager of a team in a major U.S. sport would be openly "gay."