The Topic of Relevance

While reading through posts on this blog I have come to recall a connection I made in chapter 5 of Amusing Ourselves to Death. In this chapter Postman asks a rhetorical question along the lines of asking how much of the news we encounter daily actually motivates us to do anything about it.
This brought me to the endless forms of social media constantly throwing information at consumers to educate us about any and all relevant (or irrelevant) problems in the world.
There have been disputes over the topic of trending hashtags and whether or not they really change anything. People can see a trending tag, read about it and feel sorry over it for a while before quickly posting with the hashtag and then forgetting it ever happened. Though there is the point of a trending hashtag to be spreading awareness around the world, there's also the question of whether or not the tag will really bring any change. This of course all comes back to the question mentioned above, will any of the millions of people retweeting or reposting a tag to spread awareness actually get up and do anything but just that? I'm curious to know how people would even go about really taking any action at all. I personally stay out of those big topics that are taking over social media because I know I'm fairly clueless as to how I would even try to do something about them.
I'd really like to see what some of you think considering that fact that the great majority of us use these forms of media constantly and see the things I'm referring to here.