Cultural Change and Public Representations

Sociologists have noted a time gap between mental-cultural change and material-cultural change, the latter taking time to catch up with the former. Well, simply, once you change minds and the thoughts, feelings, metaphors, analogies, and so forth therein, you still have all of the public representations in the form of physical artifacts which represent the old culture with all its symbols, metaphors, analogies, etc. So it is then a matter of actually building the physical public artifacts to match the new mental change, and that just takes time. One is still surrounded by all the past public representations of human history. Yet the public representations are not necessarily so static. As the mental contents and structures change, the public presentations can physical remain the same, while witnessing a change in meaning, caused by, and now in accordance with, the new mentality.