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Malcolm Gladwell has the happy knack of writing books that a informative, fun, and uplifting. This one is no different. Thought provoking and quick, The Tipping Point is well worth the read.
Malcolm Gladwell has the happy knack of writing books that a informative, fun, and uplifting. This one is no different. Thought provoking and quick, The Tipping Point is well worth the read.
I kept thinking about the concepts in this book long after I put it down. While the examples from epidemiology were familiar to me, the application of similar analysis to the spread of other types of epidemics, from fashion trends to the sales of a particular book, was enlightening.
A few days before I finished reading it, I heard on the radio that the West Antarctic ice shelf has reached its tipping point. It’s crumbling and melting and it can’t be stopped. The message that climate change is real and urgent has never reached the tipping point for Americans, though. Why not?
According to Gladwell, writing back in 2000, a message or a trend needs to be what he calls “sticky” if it’s going to spread. There needs to be something about it that adheres easily in our minds. We respond to human, social cues more than anything else. I related that back to this depressing news. Ocean temperatures and weather patterns and CO2 levels are not human and social. The message is complex and full of mathematical models. I used to live in Norfolk VA, and I felt sad for it when I heard about the tipping point for the Antarctic ice shelf. Sea level rising ten to fifteen feet will damage or drown so many places I’ve loved: friends’ homes; 18th century cobblestone streets; parks where I saw concerts and watched fireworks and ran; the beautiful waterfront Taiwan-American Friendship Garden; and the minor league ballpark where I watched the Tides play. The water may rise two or three feet in my lifetime—and parts of my beloved Ghent district already can flood in a thunderstorm. Why did I digress into all that in the middle of a book review? To illustrate that a personal story is stickier than an impersonal abstraction. That’s how our minds are wired. Anyone who wants people to remember and care about something has to make the message about people.
Another feature of social epidemics and their tipping points is that message has to be translated. Innovators may start an idea, but it’s often inaccessible to the mainstream. Gladwell illustrates translators by describing how fashion trends are spread. They may start with outsider teens, but they are observed by savvy adults who adapt them, modify them just a little, and sell them. And then, of course, the edgy outcasts do something new to identify themselves, and fashion translates it and spreads the next cool thing.
It takes more than translation to make something tip. Personalities matter. Some people, according to Gladwell, are Connectors. They specialize in the art of acquaintance. Not necessarily friendship, but “loose ties.” It’s natural to them to collect people and weave social webs, not with any end in mind but because they enjoy it. Social epidemics need these influential and widely acquainted people.
Epidemics also need Mavens. These are the informal experts in their social circles as well as professional experts, people who relish the collection of information and love to share it. Another necessary link is the Salesman (or woman, obviously, but Gladwell says Salesman). This is a person whose persuasive power is as natural as the Connectors’ social breadth and the Mavens’ fascination with knowledge. Gladwell describes the importance of face to face relationships when he talks about all of these people, and how their genuineness is what makes them effective. Word of mouth from spreads from them because they care. They don’t share because something is in it for them, but for the person with whom they are speaking. When you read the book, you see all of these types in action and understand how hard it would be to acquire their traits if you aren’t one of them by nature, especially the Salesman.
Gladwell doesn’t discuss social networks online, because of the age of this book, but the relationships he describes are qualitatively different from having friends on Facebook or followers or Twitter. I suspect such relationships are now supplemented but not replaced by virtual ones. The section of this book on the effects of facial expressions examines the power of nonverbal communication, which reinforces the importance of in-person connections as well as the influence of television.
Another principle of social epidemics and effective communication is the importance of small groups. Research and experience have repeatedly found that one hundred and fifty is the maximum membership number for a group to have social coherence. After that, the possibility of members really knowing each other is diminished, and the interpersonal influence of the group weakens. A group of two hundred loses the warm but loose social ties that allow good communication. Word of mouth is how social epidemics spread, and we can only listen to so many mouths.
Gladwell’s analysis of smoking contagion and addiction tipping points should be of interest to anyone concerned with smoking prevention and cessation. Negative epidemics spread the same way positive or harmless ones do. Anything can be normalized and adopted if the message is sticky. Its contagiousness is enhanced by being spread by small groups, started by innovators (cool people, often) translated into acceptable terms for others, and shared by Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen. That’s what makes it contagious.
One thing I learned from this book that was new to me was how “tipping” may apply to marketing a book. The public health promotion material was not new, since I keep up with the research in that field for professional reasons. The principle that “dogged and indiscriminate application of effort,” as Gladwell puts it, is ineffective in making an idea or a message tip is well established in community health. A good health educator doesn’t just throw programs at a community and hope they work. Writers, however, are often urged to have a massive social media presence on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google Plus and everything else, and to get a lot of likes and shares and retweets. I think it’s meant to make a writer tip, based on the idea that if you have enough Facebook friends and enough Twitter followers, people will know your name and buy your book. I have never heard a writer say this works. Even the ones who encourage others to do it say they aren’t aware of getting new readers that way. To me this sounds like “dogged and indiscriminate application of effort.”
This book has also made me think about what makes the world change, and why major social change is so slow and difficult and can take decades to tip, and yet small changes can spread rapidly. I have summarized a lot here, but such a compacted version is in no way equivalent to reading the book. Think of this as a professor’s lecture that will help you find the key points in a textbook, except unlike many textbooks this book is deeply engaging. Gladwell blends research with illustrative anecdotes in a way that keeps a reader curious and turning the page. I didn’t touch on his analysis of children’s television, teen suicide, needle sharing programs, STD epidemics, the rise and fall of crime, or other topics. You may puzzle over how these connect with trendy shoes, best sellers, and effective health promotion messages, but when you read Gladwell’s discussion of them in terms of the tipping point concept, you’ll see it all come together. He connects diverse fields of study and intriguing individuals to make an abstract idea come alive.
When I was working on my Best of 2013 and 1913 posts, I planned to include a “to-be-read” section. It would list the books that were published in 2013 that I was interested in reading but never got around to. I was going to call it “These could have been the best books of 2013 if only I had read them.” I came up with 31 books before I realized that this list was already too long and therefore incredibly boring. (Even now part of me is still tempted to curate this list into a top ten, but what would that be? Best Books of 2013 I Did Not Read? Books of 2013 I am most likely to in fact still read?) At that moment I was suddenly struck by my strange relationship to making lists of books.
So first of all, where did I get these 31 titles from? Why, obviously it was culled from a much longer list of books I would like to read. I counted and there were 187 books on that list. Theoretically I could get through all those books in a year, but I absolutely won’t, even though they’re supposedly the books I want to read. Some of those books have been on that list for many years. I feel oppressed by that list because it’s so damn long. In fact, less than one year ago I did a massive “Selektion,” keeping some books on the list but sending many others to the metaphorical gas chambers. (Yes, that’s how guilty I felt about it: I was picturing myself as an SS officer. Any other time I picture that scenario, no more than once a day, I am a camp inmate. This is probably because I’m Jewish.) Since then, the list has burgeoned again, which explains the high proportion of 2013 books on the list.
Why am I ADD about everything else in my life but OCD about books? (And OCD about thinking about the Holocaust?) These days I try to stay away from “What is the point of. . .? Why am I doing. . . ?” questions because the answers are always the same. (“There is no point, things don’t have a point.” “There is no reason, this is just something you’re doing and stop worrying about it.”) I know a lot of things are beyond my control, but maybe not this thing. Making lists of books is not actually an autonomic life function like breathing or pumping blood, as much as it may seem that way. So I could stop if I wanted to. Is the first step admitting that I am powerless over making lists of books?
I remember a more innocent time before the internet, when the only way I ever knew about books was if some human being talked about them to me with their actual mouths or if I saw a review or ad in some sort of magazine or newspaper. I got most of my books through browsing in the library or the bookstore. Now my browsing is done online and then I either put them on hold at the library or buy them from Powells or Charis online bookstores, or ABE or Alibris in a pinch. Back in the day I did have a list of books I wanted, but it was very short, and I kept it in a notebook. Even then, it sometimes took me many years to read a book on my list, but that was mostly because at that time it was harder to find any specific out-of-print book. I remember when I was a teenager my friend S. recommended a book called Come to Mecca and other stories by Farrukh Dhondy. (This recommendation may even have been made via handwritten letter mailed with a stamp!) The book stayed on my list for, oh, at least five years. I finally read it, liked it a lot, and told S. about it. She did not remember anything about the book and refused to believe she had recommended it.
The upside of the way we discover books now is that I come across books that will never be reviewed in a big periodical. Five of my favorite books of 2013 are not in my local library system because they are either from a small press or self-published. So it’s not that I want to turn off the internet (okay, well actually I kind of do.) The problem is on my end, the list making end.
I actually don’t like to read as much as I used to. I think in some way reading about books has replaced actually reading books as the satisfying activity. I read about a book, it sounds so very interesting, and then I put it on my list, which in some way mentally checks it off. Resolution has been achieved, and some sort of endorphin is released. Why would I want to actually read the book? It would take hours and I might not even like it after all.
One thing I actually still like is reading and briefly reviewing the books of one century ago. In fact, my fantasy is that someone would pay me to do that. I say this in the spirit of putting my intentions out to the universe, which as I understand it means that my intentions will magically come true because it turns out the world is a wish granting factory after all. I have in mind a classy periodical like The Chronogram. Or, perhaps a brand new magazine, devoted solely to the books of a hundred years ago. Every month there would be a different author on the cover. (Although probably it would mostly be P.G. Wodehouse, L.M. Montgomery, Arnold Bennett, Baroness Orczy, E.F. Benson, and L. Frank Baum over and over. The way David Bowie has been on the cover of Uncut magazine nine times, about 5% of all their covers. But Uncut has had women on the cover only seven times, total. My magazine would have female-identified writers on the cover every other month, at least.) I guess I’m not averse to a single, really high quality issue per year. Wealthy Edwardian-literature-loving visionary publishing dilettantes who share my dreams, contact me.
All right, I got a little off-topic here. Let me tell you how my genius girlfriend solved my list-making problem for me. I had all kinds of ideas but hers actually worked. She told me to use a Bannanagrams rule where if I want to add a new book to the list I have to delete three others. It’s been working wonderfully. If I ever get through all the books on the list, you will hear about it.
~~Moved from GR~~
This is a brilliant and fantastically well-written popular science account of the importance of networks and complexity in our everyday lives. Even though I do research in this area, the narrative grabbed and held my attention. Every concept is illustrated and told via beautifully embedded and incredibly entertaining stories. At the same time, the book's style is so clear and simple that I would love to hand it around to all the non-computer scientists I know who ask me about my research. Although certainly far from scientific, this book certainly is more eloquent, entertaining, and informative than I think a scientist could ever be.
In his narrative, Gladwell simplifies and streamlines all of the topics it discusses--in fact, to put it in the book's own terms, The Tipping Point itself is a "connector" and a "salesman," taking the abstruse knowledge of the "maven" academics and translating it to mainstream. It did indeed create an epidemic of interest in the influence of the networks around us. However, one difficulty I have with the narrative is Gladwell's absolute certainty in the theories he supports. Possibly this is because I am all too aware of the well-documented failures in the hypotheses he presents as fact. Basically every story he tells concludes with "x succeeded because they did y." Although it makes for a coherent narrative, it made me wince. One of the most important rules of statistics (and one I think it is very important for non-scientists to grasp!!!) is that correlation does not imply causation. But Gladwell ignores this. He argues his points are indisputably right and uses correlations (and even worse, cherry-picked examples that behave the way he theorizes they should) to imply causation. 
For example, he talks about the Broken Window Theory--that all the little details like graffiti create a tipping point that ends up creating the big crimes, and that fixing the windows will solve crime. He uses NYC, when Guiliani cleaned the streets and the crime radically decreased, as an example of where it was "proved." But he fails to note that NYC also introduced zero-tolerance for the "big" crimes at the same time, and that when LA tried to use graffiti-targeting tactics, they just didn't work. Thinking that correlation implies causation is bad, but cherry-picking only the data that correlates is even more problematic.
The book reminded me of The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives for a rather strange reason: the books are polar opposites in their approaches to data. Mlodinov sets out to show that everything in life has randomness, and that although it is human nature to ascribe meaning to everything, often times, there's no reason for the way things are except randomness. Gladwell, on the other hand, believes that everything has an underlying story. In my opinion, both of these approaches are seductive, but dangerous. I would love to read a book co-written by these two: together, they would be the perfect mixture of belief in an underlying model and scepticism of the data's value.
Overall, Gladwell is a fantastic storyteller. His narrative is cohesive, entertaining, and convincing. This is a wonderful read both for individuals familiar with social network theory and people who are allergic to mathematics or computers.
