Bill Tozier drew my attention to a most excellent term of art, Daniel C. Hallin’s phrase Sphere of Deviance.  That posting has the nice insight that Jon Steward makes his living in the border lands were legitimate controversy meets the deviance.

Hillard was mapping the world of national discourse, i.e. old school journalism, during the period when the consensus about Vietnam war imploded.   But this framework is universally applicable.  For example Open Source, as a tool for enterprise software development has traveled over the last decade all the way into the center.   Freudian analysis has travel out.  Some ideas orbit the consensus like comets; i.e. the fetish for solving all problems with unregulated markets.

It’s fun to take a topic (peak oil, diets, business plans) and map the various ideas and players along with their trajectories onto that drawing.

For some reason this all reminds me of how the distant periphery of cities has always been where you find the real nut case cults hanging out.