Why does anyone care?

Facebook decided to alert me to the story of some guy who took a picture of two people on a train who looked alike then he posted it to the web somewhere. I commented that this enraged me, as being possibly the least interesting thing I can think of, but of course, minutes later I encountered the story of some guy in Sweden or something who looked like Leonardo DiCaprio, so the bar for vapidity may have been cleared.
Now don't get me wrong, these "stories" are almost unimaginably banal, and the only reason I care about them is because they are so uninteresting it boggles my mind, but a friend mentioned "meanwhile in Syria" or something to that effect, and it got me thinking.

Perhaps the most common, and annoying, complaint I see about pop culture news, or really any story someone with a cause happens to have a problem with, is that it is taking attention away from ____(Fill in your preferred injustice here), I feel like this sort of doesn't work to actually get attention to your cause, for one thing, unless handled carefully, shit like that is really annoying and throws people off, for another, it really isn't raising awareness in any meaningful way. "How can you care about the Kardashians when there is still a refugee crisis" isn't really helping draw any actual attention to the crisis, and it certainly isn't putting resources and people to work on fixing it, it is basically an attempt to shut down conversation on a topic the speaker doesn't agree with.

It's internet slacktivism, and it is marginally less annoying than people sharing images of folks with cancer, or dying puppies, with the caption "Share if you aren't a bad person who loves cancer an hates puppies, 95% of you won't share". It makes the poster somehow feel like they accomplished something without them having to actually stand up and go outside, or even talk to another human being to do it.

Now understand I am only complaining about this in certain contexts, hijacking discussion is a valid form of protest, but it has to actually lead to something vaguely substantive and not just be shouting into the darkness. An example of a hijacking that all in all, ended up working out pretty well for the movement it represented would be the folks claiming to represent Black Lives Matter taking over that Bernie Sanders rally during the summer in Seattle, I personally felt like they should have hit another target, however it is impossible to ignore that the act brought a lot of attention to the movement from a group that might have been inclined to ignore them and their cause, Northwest liberals are by and large, a really white bunch of folks, and need to be prodded to pay attention to racial issues sometimes I think.

The point is, it worked, but it wasn't just hitting Sanders' Facebook page with the latest memes and leaning back from their computer monitors with the satisfied smile of a college atheist in a philosophy class, they actually went out and did something for their message.

And another thing! I don't care about stupid news stories, but, just as I have the freedom to rant about them on this blog, writers have the freedom to write whatever story they want as well. And readers have the freedom to care about it or not as they see fit, and while yes, there are some for whom there is no room in their heads for new ideas or causes to take up space, the majority of the populations is still capable of caring about more than one thing at a time, and honestly it's a thirty second read of something on the Internet, it really isn't taking a whole lot of energy to care about here.

So why does anyone care? I dunno, who cares?