Remember that song “Video Killed the Radio Star” by the Buggles? Well if you are not as ancient as I, you can watch it here. For a moment it makes you wonder what went wrong with America in the 1980s.

Sure, MTV may have been the beginning of the end for music radio. But the reality is that we are a culture of trends. The hockey hair and mustache I’m sporting today looked really good in the 1970s. Today, not so much.  Swing music was hot in the 1920s and ’30s and made a comeback in the late 1990s.  It’s not so hot right now. And knickers were all the rage in….well……OK, bad example.

It would seem people get bored of things very easily. Either that, or something comes along that becomes the next big thing and we forgot whatever we were wholly absorbed with just a few weeks prior.

The question in media, marketing and communications — as my partner Dan’s obsession goes — is where is this all going?  Yes, it’s going somewhere, but where it’s going tomorrow, next week or next year might not be the final resting point.

We all can see that the traditional media model is broken, and a transition is currently underway from old school media to multiple forms of electronic media.

In social forums, MySpace was the rage but is lagging badly now, Facebook continues to expand by leaps and bounds, and Twitter is red hot….today.  We are moving very fast.

For those interested in media trends, I’d recommend reading this very solid Washington Post story by Paul Fahri about the impending death of traditional television. It’s nothing that surprises those of us living in the new media space. But for some reason just seeing it in the Post had an indelible impact on me (maybe because I grew up on the Post). It was like all of that stuff we preach to clients, prospective clients, even that homeless bunny rabbit living under my house I talk to — it was like it became more real.

I guess that’s why we always tell people that today’s mainstream, traditional media has become the validation point.

For example, do you remember the “Rick Roll” craze?  The deal, of course, was that you receive this classic gem of a video by red-headed crooner Rick Astley via e-mail. Normally, the link arrived under false pretenses like, “Check out this amazing article!” You’d watch the entire video most times — you couldn’t help yourself — and you’d laugh. I mean, how great is that guy who does the leap off the fence wearing the Hamburglar tee shirt for no good reason?

Anyhow, the trend lasted for a good six months. It blew up! Did you notice that video had been watched by more than 21,000,000 viewers? Amazing.

Then, the New York Times wrote about it. They sat back and watched it spread, reported on it, and validated the trend. And you know what else it did to the trend? It killed it. After that story I never got another e-mail. It wasn’t cool any longer. Trend over.

So where is this all going? I don’t know (and love people who say they do).  But it seems every six months or so we continue to see more next big things and then they go away (hello SecondLife). It’s the cyclic reality of our media universe, and those who aren’t adept enough to live with that reality might end up left behind with Buggles videos, knickers, and hockey hair.