Brian Lingle
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conscience, You have some valid points but the overall tone comes off as an attack.
Trends in the arts are common and when they become history they're referred to as movements, like the Impressionist movement or the Abstract Expressionist movement.
A lot of people have been doing strobist type work for a long time. Some better than others.
The internet has raised the level of communication and interaction between people with similar interests and the spread of knowledge and the generation of knowledge is increasing exponentially. There have always been pockets or groups of creative people who exchanged ideas and created work that became identified as influenced by that group. Hemingway and his group comes to mind. Communication being what it is now, the size of the groups is much larger.
With hundreds of thousands of images being generated and distributed in the media daily and over a century of archives to draw from, it's unlikely that anyone is going to do anything that has no roots in previous work.
Actually, several people on this forum do teach professionally and do present at major conventions, such as the WPPI.
Originality is a complex subject and too philosophical to try to address well in a forum post. In any field, there are technicians who take the techiniques and knowledge they're given and produce good work. We need them. There are also innovators who take what is and create some new combinations or twists with it and move the field a little further forward. It is expected and necessary that the technicians will incorporate, assimilate and internalize the new information, in practice, making it their own.
Currently, in photography, I think the technology dominates and creates the innovations more pervasively than individuals. But it's not either-or. In THE MEDIA IS THE MESSAGE, Marshall Mcluhan makes the point that we use new technologies to do what we did with the old technologies until we have assimilated the new technologies enough to do with them what they do best. Ex: early movies looked like stage plays and early scripts were dialogue heavy, like the radio show dialogues that preceeded them.
Regarding creativity: Judging the final product is only one, limited way to think of it. Doing photography is about seeing, conceiving and composing images. To a beginner working at the most basic level, every "aha" moment, every element that opens their eyes and changes their way of seeing, of conceiving, of composing, and every moment that enhances their experience of living is a moment of sublime creativity at the most powerful level.
Viewing someone else's photos and having an "aha" moment or being moved is only one small moment in their lives. The creative experience, the originality of each response we have to the infinite possibilities presented in each moment is true originality and it is our greatest treasure.
That said, achieving recognition as a great innovator in any field is rare and it doesn't happen in isolation.
As far as people raving about mediocre works as though they're masterpieces, if you take time to really see what's going on instead of merely judging and rejecting it, you can take it for what it is.
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I sure hope he's not registered at DPR....