One of the criticisms of social media is that most of the information people post is frivolous and narcissistic - and there's little argument that it is so. It's comforting to keep in touch with old friends and to know what they're up to, but the brevity, ease, and frequency of updates means that a lot of very silly information is shared.
I acknowledge that narcissistic expression fills valid emotional needs: to believe that you matter and that you are accepted sometimes requires testing the waters - so tossing out a scrap of trivial nonsense about your own humdrum life solicits comments, or at least acknowledgements that someone cares enough about you to pay attention to your havering.
However, pause to consider that every so often, a bit of information that seems silly and useless actually proves to be useful: the comment from someone who found a store that sells only lampshades has a definite "so-what" quality until you need a lampshade and discover how few retail outlets sell them.
Unfortunately, that value is largely inaccessible: Facebook's search function will not enable you to find posts by friends about lampshades - it just doesn't work that way. Twitter's search engine will do so, but it does not restrict the search to just friends, so any tweet by anyone that contains that word will come up, and the search isn't very smart.
So it seems that social media is presently no better than human memory in terms of finding useful information - you have to remember who said something, scan through the record of all their past posts, and try to find it - which is highly time-consuming and inefficient.
If the social media services ever fix their search capabilities, or if search engines gain the ability to adequately search social media content, perhaps that will change, enabling users to sift through piles of posts and comments that were useless at the time, but have become potentially useful when the need arises.
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