There is a specter haunting social media, and no, for those of you that recognize the paraphrase, it's not communism. It's kind of the opposite, actually: the looming insolvency wrought by insufficient or unsuccessful monetization.

Unlike the (first) dot-com bubble, where so many ideas existed only as vaporware, today many of our best media and technology ideas have been given virtual flesh; they exist, out there in the world, the offspring of programmers, visionaries, and venture capitalists. News aggregators, such as Pulse,  that curate the events of the world and deliver them in the manner you prefer, software that converts the messiness of poorly thought-out web design into a beautiful “readable” package, the capacity to share information in the form of ideas, and images, and video, at the speed of 4G LTE, from anyone, anywhere. In popular parlance, status updates have been immortalized (though not necessarily in a good way), and even “tweeting,” a word that once elicited monuments of much-deserved derision, now enjoys a common, even banal standing in popular discourse.

And yet.

People are often suspect of theory – you'll hear someone say “well, that's just a theory,” as if a theory sits just one or two steps away from a guess or strong opinion. We can see this dismissive characterization in the rhetoric of some hard science skeptics – climate change deniers, intelligent design advocates – because it provides a way to assert that, indeed, their own opinion is equally as valid as the theory of some random scientist. The bias against theory becomes even more pronounced when we begin talking about the so-called “soft” sciences, the human sciences, where questions of proof dovetail with methodology and interpretation in a manner that smacks of inference rather than evidence. Fields like history, sociology, communication, and even psychology do posit theories, backed by research and evidence, but these theories tend to have an even steeper hill to climb than do theories in the material sciences.