• “I never asked for this.”
• “Fake! The World will ends in 2012.”
• “OMG, you left your porn on the fridge again.”
• “I was expecting more than a better touch screen.”
• “Cannot retrieve user data. Data Plan may be exceeded.”
• “How about Microsoft stop daydreaming and create some damn jobs for the working class.”
• “That mom is having affair with that Japanese administrator, while father is forced to stay home with daughter, cooking like a woman.”
• “Where are the fucking robots and flying cars already?”

Do leave a comment of your own, won’t you?

[No video? watch it on YouTube]

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Well, I’m a fool and the paper in question, Financially Fragile Households: Evidence and Implications is authored by the aforementioned trio of financial laureates.

In short, the paper “examines households’ financial fragility by looking at their capacity to come up with $2,000 in 30 days”.

While the paper is written for policy makers — hardly an excuse for being boring although a convention I suppose — it has been picked up by the media who seem fixated with the unremarkable findings that America’s beleaguered bourgeoisie are no longer immune from the “financial shock” that the piss-poor and proletariat have been surviving ever since Karl Marx defaulted on his Freddy Engels payday loan.

Clearly, the paper’s “Hello, Dr. Huxstable, let me introduce you to your new neighbor the Bundys” tone has a certain all-American tragic irony about it. And while phrases like “pecking order of coping mechanisms” reassures us that class consciousness will see us through in tact, the news media may have overlooked the papers real import:

“The level of financial fragility we identify suggests business opportunities for firms to provide better products for households.”

And there you have it. Buried beneath layers of empirical research, learned references, and the painfully obvious conclusions about what people do when they are strapped for cash, the age-old exploitation of unfortunate people for the benefit of opportunistic corporations, people selling stuff on the never-never and banks anxious to service the nouveau pauvre.

The papers’ authors, and even you perhaps, may dismiss my jaundiced view as the rantings of a fool. With statements like, “This contention [as in flogging the family silver before selling your kidneys] leads to opportunities for considerable additional research,” one can only assume they’ll be back to help me smarten-up. I can’t wait.

[Nice graphic]

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Services like Paper.li, Tabbloid, The Tweeted Times, and Feedly mash-up the linked-to content, typically in a newspaper or magazine format.  I am noticing that even sites like LinkedIn are jumping on the bandwagon with the recent launch of LinkedIn Today. Whatever next?

I am starting to realize that among the problems these me-too services face in overcoming the scramble for users and brand recognition are the legitimate concerns about pseudo-journalism, self-appointed experts, and mob-rule. Yet sometimes, one hopes, these services can deliver campaign objectives or be a source of trusted, useful, and up-to-date information. A case in point…

I just signed up for an invite to the private beta for Scoop.it [yes, as in dog food] and then came across this Social Media Policies in the Work Place. I thought you might like both the service and the topic too. Again, one hopes.

Read the rest here ».

Read the rest here ».

So it was with Rose Mirielle Exumé and her sister Alta Grace Garcon who one Monday afternoon left their home in Deerfield Beach, Florida to travel the 15 miles or so to Broward General.

What is normally a routine journey on I-95 was for this family anything but and Olivier Jean Paul Exumé was born in the fast lane in the back seat of his auntie’s SUV.

For the drivers on the road that day who would have imagined the drama in that car pulling over for no apparent reason? For sure, they were as oblivious to the clamor that accompanied baby Olivier’s birth just as the heaving mother and her panic-stricken sister were oblivious to the travelers speeding by.

Like the information superhighways where data streams in self-contained packets so too do people transport themselves along I-95 absorbed in the bubble of their own journey and experience. Data conveying information about national security and seismic activity share the same beam of light as updates about Uncle Vinnie’s hemorrhoids. No doubt gangsters running drugs and soccer Moms dropping off children were among those whistling by the lurching SUV.

Olivier’s passage was featured on the evening news. The miracle of life was not in of itself important but the circumstances of its coming to be the “human interest” headline. This is the kind of warm and fuzzy stuff that keeps viewers glued to the box while the commercials run, good for ratings, good for business.

Where the news was most welcomed was in the neighborhood where Rose and her sister lived. Carried by word-of-mouth, the news soon traveled beyond the metropolis and the farthest reaches of I-95 to places where the network is defined by the community of familial ties, shared experiences, language and culture.

Suddenly, Rose was getting messages from “friends” who she never knew she had. It included people she had never heard of but who felt a connection nonetheless. It transpired that through this one and that one they shared mutual friends. People who she had left behind in the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince suddenly popped up living around the corner and up the road. Just as new friendships were being made old ones were being reestablished.

The network was working. It began to take on a tangible form in the gift of diapers, car seats, bibs and bibles. An everyday event, remarkable only for the time and place of it, was the catalyst for a form of “social networking” that transcended self-interest and who-knows-who. Rose and others were personally enriched by the experience.

I-95 is a road that is seemingly always under construction. Today the work is less about the route and more about the ride. Likewise, today the Internet and its proliferation of tools, applications and content is less about the network and more about relevancy for its users.

In both instances, physical and virtual connections are easier and faster to make and navigate. But the things that define and connect communities in the real world and online are changing in ways that make “bringing physical community to online networks” a harder thing to do than at first we might think.

For those of us whose imagination is sparked by the possibility and promise of the Recruiting Roadshow there is much to reflect on in Rose’s story. For example:

When our careering down the road precludes us from being first hand witnesses to the daily miracles of life or when the human experience is trivialized to serve commercial interests; or when we fail to learn the trusted vernacular that makes word-of-mouth credible; or we fail to respond in ways that strengthen our ties to “place,” how will we ever enjoy the gifts of relative strangers who would rather you call them “friend?”

“Bringing physical community to online networks,” imagine that.

Here I am today watching the latest in the now degenerated genre of let-me-addle-your-brains-with-a-factoid-video and find myself asking, “So what?”

[Trouble viewing the video? Watch it on YouTube]

Okay, so another 100 hours of video just got uploaded to YouTube — so what? 78 percent of articles on Wikipedia are not in English — your point is? 34 percent of bloggers post opinions about products and brands — who would have thought it!

Of course, if all this data does have import, and my business will suffer for my not paying attention to it, I might as well slink off now, huddle up in the corner, and die. Ah, but then what?