Why does Social Media not work properly?

Why does Social Media not work properly?
Because everyone expects it to work as they envision it will work.
There is no mass in social media. There is nothing to measure. Just individuals, each sitting in front of a computer expecting the media will respond in a particular way. There are lapses in manners, because there are no consequences. Help someone out, and watch them disappear without a thank you. Why? We don’t know. Some of us think we have this medium sussed out. We don’t. There isn’t one single expert in social media, not one. That’s what I believe. We have been given a machine that cranks, heaves, yaws, and three  hundred million people are gathered around, some stepping forward to say the machine works this way, others say it works in reverse and still others think it goes up and down. The machine careens this way and that like a huge drunken Caterpillar earthmover, except it does not seem to have any inherent danger nor consequence. It’s a vaporous toy. It has not built anything. It probably put a president in the White House but they just played the media harder and it responded to force. We are playing with it and trying to figure out what it will do. What we can make it do. Will it snap back angrily, or worse, ignore us? Can we sell our stuff and make money with it? Who would know how best to do that? I have three thousand friends. Is anybody out there?  Or just the usual three who comment? Are others listening in and reading, that I should know about? Am I doing anything wrong? Do I believe I should be teaching something? Turning people on to some information I believe is important? Or perhaps it’s just information, opinion, not important. I’ll post anyway. Get to see my  name in lights. That is what social media is. It is trying to figure out what it does. So we need to be wary of bringing our old social conventions to it and expecting them to work in the way they always used to. Here you don’t need to say thank you. Here you don’t need to be. The only reason to hang around and ‘work’ with it is to be part of the discovery of what it becomes. To be able to say we were players. No thing has yet been created, I don’t think. Maybe I missed something, I don’t know. But so far I haven’t seen anything that has been created. Passing information along may have some importance. And perhaps there are actual things that have been created. Perhaps there are people who have been helped. Or wounded in some way. Perhaps the medium is the message. And we are so taken with it, we message away like crazy people. Until a fire is coming down a mountain and we use this medium to warn residents in it’s path. There is more to it than this. So along with this we play.