Which leads to my other favorite modern myth that we never built a bigger ship than Titanic since that disaster. It's interesting to point out that very few modern Cruise Ships are smaller than the Titanic.
It reminds me a bit of the Challenger disaster, which was probably the biggest news headline of my childhood. 7 people died. More people die in a typical mass shooting, but we remember Challenger because it was a really big deal with the first civilian in space, and so everyone was watching the launch and had it blow up in front of them. It's likely that people care about the Titanic because it was supposedly "unsinkable" - if it had been the Carpathia that went down with 1500 people, it might've made headlines for a couple days but we wouldn't be talking about it 106 years later.
Hell, I didn't hear about Doña Paz until today, despite being the largest peacetime maritime disaster in history and happening just 2 years after Challenger.
I suspect a big part of the tragedy of the Challenger was a breaking of the "futuristic utopia" myth that many had in their minds at the time. A lot of it has disappeared in the last 20 years (or at least moved over to the singularity/AI myth), but back then things like the L5 Society [1] were popular, and you couldn't read Popular Mechanics without some sort of story about moon/mars bases.
In short, people wanted to believe that we could just go into space and leave all the problems we had and mistakes we made on earth behind. It was a sort-of "salvation". The Challenger was a poignant reminder that this was not the case.
Which leads to my other favorite modern myth that we never built a bigger ship than Titanic since that disaster. It's interesting to point out that very few modern Cruise Ships are smaller than the Titanic.