[izaidi]

What's happened in the last decade and a half is technology (information technology) has fully colonized the popular culture, and popular culture tends to be shallow by nature -- not because people are shallow, but because people are alike in their shallow, base tastes and dissimilar in their deeper, more refined tastes. Mobile/social technology is coming to play the role in our society that television played in the second half of the 20th century. (Interestingly, the best TV has become quite a bit smarter and deeper, largely because of the same underlying technological developments.)