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Title:
The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
Review:
Gladwell has written here the best explanation I've seen of the meme
theory: that ideas operate like germs and spread like epidemics. Why,
he asks, did Hush Puppies, a nearly moribund shoe brand, suddenly
become cool? Why did Paul Revere succeed in not only spreading the
news that the British were coming, but arousing men to armed
resistance, when another man who also carried the news might as well
have stayed home for all the good he did? Gladwell says there are
three conditions that matter in the spread of ideas: the law of the
few, the stickiness factor, and the power of context.
The few who matter, he says, are connectors, mavens, and salesmen. The
connectors are people like Paul Revere, whose acquaintance is so wide
and varied that they can spread an idea across many disparate groups
that have no contact with each other. I think that's kind of what I
do, really, because people come to me from all different directions,
some because of BookBytes, some because of Best Info, some because of
ExLibris; others come because of columns I've written on wildly
varying topics like rock music or Dr. Kevorkian or the value of
government.
Another group is the mavens, the people who are well-known both for
expert knowledge and enthusiasm -- think of Stephen Jay Gould, for
instance, who bubbles over with ideas and knowledge and connections
between them, but also with eagerness to tell people about what he's
learned. Then there are the salesmen, the born persuaders; think, for
instance, about the kids you knew in high school who could wear
something odd and different and instantly make it cool and trendy.
That's not enough in itself, though, according to Gladwell; there has
to be stickiness as well, something that gives people a reason to
register the idea in their minds. One example he gives is a cheesy bit
of advertising that told people to look for a gold seal in a record
club ad that they could cut out and trade in for free CDs. Looking for
the gold seal gave people a reason to pay attention to the ads. He
draws other examples from the development and testing of Sesame Street
and another children's show, Blue's Clues.
But context matters just as much. Gladwell draws on a lot of classic
experiments in social psychology and even biology to explain why some
situations nourish the spread of ideas and some do not. How did Divine
Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood become a best-seller? By being
discovered by small groups of women, who all told their other friends,
who spread it in their own small groups. Ideas spread best, it seems,
within small groups of less than 150 people, the largest size group
within which people can actually know each other and understand the
complex relationships among the group members. Other contextual
factors that influence the spread of ideas include prevailing beliefs,
genetics, and diffusion of responsibility (if enough people are
present in a crisis, many people won't act because they believe
somebody else will).
He keeps his thesis lively and convincing by drawing his illustrations
from all over the place -- studies of smoker behavior, the epidemic of
youth suicide in Micronesia, the deliberate keep-it-small management
strategy of Gore-Tex, the stabbing of Kitty Genovese while 38 people
watched, the way Bernhard Goetz became a folk hero ... Gladwell is a
born storyteller, and his book reads like a mystery you can't put
down. But it can also be read as a manual of useful strategies for
spreading our own memes -- better tax support for libraries, for
instance -- more effectively.
Free Pint Reviewer:
Marylaine, who is known for building one of the first librarian web
directories, Best Information on the Net (BIOTN), is now a full-time
writer, Internet trainer, and publisher of two ezines for librarians,
ExLibris and Neat New Stuff I Found This
Week . She's written numerous articles
for library publications, has edited a book called The Quintessential
Searcher: the Wit and Wisdom of Barbara Quint [Information Today, 2001]
, and is working on
another book about how librarians can manage the unintended
consequences of our technologies.
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