Who is it really?

I recently learned to Floss (the swaying dance, not the teeth care activity), something that came quite easily to me, which I understand is not true for everybody.  I boasted about this accomplishment to a group of colleagues who range from my age to late teens/early 20's (I've never thought to ask for specifics).  I was told that the Floss is dead.  My accomplishment is a hollow victory.  Once again, I became trendy late enough to be hilarious.  It got me wondering: Who decides these things?

I read Malcolm Gladwell's wonderful Tipping Point, so I know the mechanism of how ideas/trends/styles, etc. are spread.  But who starts a trend, I wonder.

Perhaps some adorbs (see how up to date?!) six-year-old tot was caught doing that silly dance on camera by his grandma, who posted it to some social media site, it was passed along, and Bingo!  A new sensation.  The latest phenomenon.  The current trend.  The trendy current.

Mr. Gladwell's book antedates Facebook.  He couldn't study what social media does to our tastes, our interests, our communication, our politics, our addictions.  (Perhaps he has by now, and if he has, I want a copy of that book.)  I'm guessing that the conveyance of culture is not what it was and never will be again, thanks to social media.  Masses of people now spend hours of their lives sharing their opinions, photos of their pets and their dinners, their theories, their plans, their insecurities.  Mostly their opinions.  Well, not fair to say "their" opinions, because here I am sharing mine.  But the mitigating factors are that I do this about once a week instead of eight times an hour, and I'm probably doing it into the wind and I don't know if a blog is considered social media.  Still, ya got me.

I know this is the world as it is now, and no reason either to fight it nor mourn.  It's just a cruel fact of this era that I can hear about a trendy dance, see it a few times, learn to do it, and then find out that it makes me terribly dated and dismissable.  Oh well, it wasn't all that important.  I had fun Flossing, and still do when I'm at home and dancing my ass off.  I've never once been trendy before, so why would I think I could be now?