In response to weak job numbers report last week:There is a tendency to take whatever just happened and assume it forward. That's doubly true when the data is dramatic. ... Remember, it was just a few months ago that we were celebrating what seemed to be a nascent recovery. We added more than 200,000 jobs in December, January, and February. And the commentary began to assume that this would continue. Economists began explaining why the economy was coming back. Pundits began gaming out how Mitt Romney would have to rethink his campaign strategy now that the economy was piling on jobs. (And, to show I don't just make this point when recoveries falter, here's a post from February in which I warned against making those arguments.)Today, we're hearing the exact reverse set of extrapolations. Economists are explaining why the recovery is clearly faltering. Pundits are wondering how President Obama will…

Once you get past the brain-threatening sentence that starts the second paragraph ("There has been a lot of scholarship devoted to the study of Facebook..."), this short blog post is informative, if not exactly insightful.A study showed, apparently, that people who tag themselves in a lot of Facebook photos and amass a lot of friends "were more likely to exhibit narcissistic traits." Okay, fine, but while our AP Psych class works to unravel that shocker, the post also notes a second study, which found that high Facebook use was associated with "openness"--lack of concern over privacy, comfort with information that "flows freely."This highlights a problem that's simple but hard to classify as we try to understand social media: Our paradigms haven't caught up with our behavior. The nuances of control that technology has given us over self-presentation and broadcast can't be slotted neatly into a worldview in which authors and…