The reason the tastes of people who populate photo sites is so divergent from the tastes of everyone else is that the former spend a great deal of time inside a bubble.
Or maybe they simply go and look at the kind of images they like.
Besides that's a bit of a nonsense statement.
"The reason the tastes of people who visit museums is so divergent from the tastes of everyone else is that the former spend a great deal of time inside a bubble."
Substitute the bits in bold for rock concerts, theatre, art house cinemas, eat at MacDonalds and so on....
People who hang out on the internet and, I suppose, in photo clubs, teach one another specific ideas. Social pressures nudge all pictures toward a single common groupthinked taste.
Ideas are reinforced, sometimes brutally, whether or not they are good ideas. There is very little room for divergence from the common taste in one of these social settings.
Not necessarily. You can get hugely divergent ideas even in small groups. All depends on the people involved anyway
Eventually, that common taste drifts to something generic and uninteresting. Every picture is simply an exercise in avoiding the 'mistakes' the group has arbitrarily decided are anathema.
This hasn't got anything to do with whether the common people like the pictures. When the common people demonstrate that they don't, the group simply declares them ignorant, and treats this as further evidence of the group's excellent taste.
Most people are not originators, so what? Most people follow fashions, they don't create them.
Anyone who thinks their taste is superior to others is a fool. A pompous one at that. Plenty of them amongst the 'common people' too, snobbery exists everywhere.
A chap I know
wrote a song about the opposite of this a while back.
