An extracurricular aspect of our adolescent reality is the formation of
mutual understandings about Things That We Like, from musicians to
movies to food to opinion columnists to TV shows (and indeed TV itself).
Of course, people have long had straightforward tastes that cluster
around trends--this is how popular culture sustains itself--but social
media seems to have sped up that process, or at least made its
mechanisms visible. A system that feeds on humans' social impulses--for
identification, approval, and association--encourages those drives,
inevitably rewarding the immediate and recognizable over the difficult
and unfamiliar.