The Twitterverse and blogsphere are raging pro and con over the hiring of homeless people to promote mobile wi-fi devices at the South by Southwest conference calling it ‘exploitation’.

It matters not that Mitchell Gibbs, director of development at the Front Steps homeless shelter and involved in setting up the program, believes it has inspired an “entrepreneurial spirit” among its homeless participants, “It’s an employment opportunity, regardless of who is offering it.”

And homeless participant Clarence Jones must be wrong when he says, “Everyone thinks I’m getting the rough end of the stick, but I don’t feel that. I love talking to people and it’s a job. An honest day of work and pay.”

Obviously the pundits know more; they’ve probably spent more time working hands on with the homeless than Gibbs and studied homelessness more than Jones.

These days arrogance knows no bounds and this is a great example of that.

I don’t see this as any different than the human sign holders, many of whom are also homeless, that you see at major intersections promoting everything from mattress sales to cell phones to pizza.

Of course, the products they promote don’t infringe the promised land of tech, so nobody cares.

It’s likely that nobody would care if they hired the homeless as hotspots in other cities or even in Austin when SXSW wasn’t on.

I agree with Adam Hanft, who said that even if the effort was well intended, it seemed to turn a blind eye to that disconnect. “There is already a sense that the Internet community has become so absurdly self-involved that they don’t think there’s any world outside of theirs.”

Talking abut disconnect, perhaps the Internet community is catching up with the financial community.

Can you imagine the backlash if the homeless were hired as sign holders for banks anywhere?

Flickr image credit: Brett Jordan

I received a call from a reader, I’ll call him Doug, (I love calls, you may reach me at 866.335.8054, 9 AM to11 PM Pacific time.) who wanted to know why I kept harping on the need for long-term this and long-term that. He said that he’s 26 and part of “the online generation” and used to “instant gratification.”

We talked for quite awhile and I found him to be intelligent, well-spoken and, in his own way despite what he said, thoughtful—but also impatient.

Influencing others is always stressed as a major trait of leadership—maybe the most important trait. But to lead on any level requires an understanding of the larger picture, along with strategic understanding of what’s coming down the road.

Neither one of those offers much instant anything.

I’m not saying Doug speaks for his entire generation, but in a post last summer I linked to several books and articles discussing changes occurring in brain functions as a result of the digital world.

One of the links is to an essay in the Atlantic Monthly by author Nicholas Carr in which he says, “the net is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation”. He cited other high-powered thinkers and online commentators: what if the way I THINK has changed? asked one. “I’ve lost the capacity to read War and Peace any more,” said another, whose current best effort was to stay with a three or four-paragraph weblog entry.”

Another article talks about Dr. Gary Small, a professor at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at the University of California, Los Angeles and author of a new book, iBrain, “who cites a Stanford University study that for every hour a person spends on a computer, personal interaction with others drops by 30 minutes.

“With the weakening of the brain’s neural circuitry controlling human contact,” Dr. Small writes, “our social interactions may become awkward, and we tend to misinterpret, and even miss, subtle, non-verbal messages.”

You can think of it along the scale of Asperger’s syndrome, which is a mild form of it, where there’s not social connectiveness and difficulties with eye contact.”

And this isn’t just about the so-called digital generation, “Scans of the more practised internet users [55-78] during those search tasks showed increased activity in the front of the brain, where reasoning, complex decision-making, short-term memory and the processing of sensations and thoughts all originate. … Within five days though, the digital newcomers were showing the same neural activity.”

Along with greed, is it possible that this new style brain affected the people who ran the banks, hedge funds, and other businesses that played fast and loose with your money?

How will these new brains lead as they move into the workforce and the world?

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Image credit: sxc.hu