When white men ruled, it was a mainly hegemonic cultural order, with minorities and women given some scraps, and not as much cultural conflict as now. Now it's becoming a multipolar order, with people of many different races, ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations jockeying for power based on whatever group they belong to. This has led to more cultural instability and conflict.
And it's usually informative to examine culture change TOGETHER with infrastructure and demographic change.
After the advent of television, you had an effective expansion of primordial 'cyber space' or really media space. You now had television as the natural medium for entertainment in the form of story telling. So long form radio plays effectively died in the 1950s. The vacuum in AM radio was filled by DJs who played for the burgeoning post-war demographic of the 'teenager'... who could listen on smaller sets in their bedrooms while the family watched Gunsmoke. With their own media space, teenagers developed a separate and new identity.
In the 1960s, television popped into colour and the artistry of the medium began to gain its own look and feel. Panel discussions and public television gave space to liberal themes, and you had a new kind of public intellectual and political oratory eg. the guise of JFK. As the decade went on, the speed and vibrancy of the medium coupled with hippie culture and eventually you had coverage of protests, the summer of love and Laugh In.
It's not enough to examine cultural and demographic changes in isolation. You need to look at both. I'll admit that my points aren't easy to confirm, but in retrospect it seems obvious to me at least.
More to come later. I'll respond to the rest of your substantive note here, and we can talk about cable networks and the web next.
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