>>32396770They will probably have their own Pokémania. Each generation tends to have several such collective manias, affecting not just children but people of all ages. Just from my own childhood/adolescance I remember Tamagotchi, beanie babies, the dot com bubble, neopets, Beyblade, Yugioh, the housing bubble, and probably more if I think about it.
The internet has made them less common because far less human interaction is occurring in meatspace than was still occurring in the 1990s. People are retreating more and more into their own personalized media bubbles, and collective experiences are fewer and further between.
But internet memes are just the newest incarnation of these collective manias. A meme like Harambe, for example, fills the same niche that these consumerist schoolyard crazes filled in the 90s. These collective experiences ground us in time and space, and validate our membership in society: we all feel like we're "in" on the joke/craze/etc.
The life cycle for these manias is getting shorter and shorter too, with the lightning pace and ephemeral nature of online interactions. As this interview from March 2000 shows, the Pokémon craze was only just dying down then after going strong for 2 years in North America:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fI_7Zvo2FBISimilar crazes tend to metastasize and reach their peak faster nowadays, but disappear even more suddenly. The Pokémon GO craze lasted only 2 months in 2016, vs the 2 years Pokémon reigned from 1998-2000.
