That's a good question (not sarcasm, it might come off that way). I actually do have a small investment yet I never planned on exercising any control and only control a trivial number of shares. There's a fair bit of academic debate on these theories of control and how shareholders relate to companies.

Personally I think there's a lot of freeloading off the small group of big players that do exercise control. I have a certain amount of faith that they won't vote in a way that's seriously adverse to my interests as a little fish.