Your Humble Blogger started The Tipping Point (Boston: Little Brown 2000) in 2003; my Best Reader and I took our time with it, as it’s That Sort of Book.
I am a big fan of Malcolm Gladwell’s essays, particularly Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg and The New-Boy Network, tho’ I’ve enjoyed many others as well. He explains counter-intuitive things remarkably well, and that’s not easy. His writing also is magnificently structured and entertaining; the essay form is (as bloggers ought to know) deceptively difficult to master, and a well-made essay is so much better than most that a new Gladwell essay is a cause for some eagerness. On the other hand, Mr. Gladwell does have his flaws as a popularizer of social science; in particular, he tends to use statistics loosely, and that is one of my top annoyances. I find myself not altogether trusting his representation of the study he is talking about. Still, I’m a big fan, and was looking forward to being persuaded by the book.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t. The thesis of the book, more or less, is that social trends act as epidemics, and that understanding the way social epidemics work is (a) counter-intuitive and (b) helpful. The titular Tipping Point is an illustration of how an accumulation of seemingly small nudges can ‘tip’ a social trend into an epidemic, how suddenly everybody seems to be on the Atkins Diet, not because of any Big Changes that happened but because it suddenly, unexpectedly Tipped. It is an interesting phenomenon, and not altogether new. Mr. Gladwell describes several things that Tipped, from Hush Puppies to the New York subway system’s wave of crimelessness.
There are, according to Mr. Gladwell’s book, three big Rules (more like aspects, honestly) of the Tipping Point: the Law of the Few, the Stickiness Factor, and the Power of Context. I’ll actually be writing separate notes about each of these; it’s That Kind of Book. Briefly, here, he points out the seemingly disproportionate influence of a few kinds of people; how some stuff seems to stick, while other stuff slides off, and how the water we swim in affects us far more than we like to think. I believe he’s right about all of those, in a way, and wrong about them in a way, which is why I’m hoping to write about them all.
The Big Thing about the book, though, is that Mr. Gladwell thinks we can perhaps manipulate social epidemics, or at least understand the limits of manipulation. If we want to, say, decrease teen smoking (to use one of his examples), or encourage people to vote, or publicize a book, or persuade people of a political philosophy or policy stance, or get visitors to a web site, you can use the three Rules (if they are correctly described) both to place resources where they will work and to avoid wasting resources where they won’t. Imagine that; a campaign to increase voter turnout that actually works, and that doesn’t waste money on stupid worthless ads.
Can we really do that? Stay tuned, Gentle Readers.
Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.