Yet another thought on the reading

I've hit rock bottom in creativity today (which is obvious by the title of this blog). So here it is. Bear with me.
This past week, we looked at pieces by Watts, Gladwell and Barabasi. These readings were ones that I could relate to a bit more than those previous. I don't know about you, but I'm not very technologically savvy, and therefore all the talk about grid architecture and such was really lost on me. The pieces this week just seemed to make more sense. They also weren't that bad to read.
I knew but I didn't know (if that makes any sense) that SOMEONE was out there deciding what was going to be cool or not. Who knew it was tweens in Brooklyn?
I think it's so weird to think about: something (like the Hush Puppies men's shoe) can be in existence for many years, decades even, and not come into its period of cool until it is nearly extinct. I guess for the shoe, it fits into the "vintage" classification, which is pretty hot right now.
I don't know about everyone else, but I found it hard to transition from "cool" referring to a type of media to "cool" in the sense that we are all familiar with. All this back and forth makes me wonder what is coming next. It's hard to take one concept and apply to many different ideas/objects/etc.