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kahawa 's review for:
The Tipping Point
by Malcolm Gladwell
I liked that this was written before internet studies had taken over everything, and yet it's still a very relevant book. Gladwell keeps it interesting with the case studies and his observations, and I think there's a lot in there that's useful when thinking about social movements.
For my own record, I'm listing a few points to remember and think about.
1. The Law of the Few
According to Gladwell, epidemics happen because of a few people, not because everyone just starts doing something. These people have key influences on others, being that they naturally connect many people, naturally disseminate information and advice, and naturally convince other people. The hoi polloi, for the most part, just get caught up in what's happening, but the Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen are the true key factors in any epidemic.
a. Connectors - people who have lots of connections and relationships. They do this naturally, without conscious effort. Gladwell isn't saying saying that we should be more like them, just that they exist, and we can recognise them if we know what to look for.
b. Mavens - people who have a strong desire to impart information and 'help' to others. They're really concerned about accurate product info, or best deals, etc.
c. Salesmen - charismatic people, able to influence others.
2. The Stickiness Factor
Ideas that reach a tipping point and become social epidemics have a quality that Gladwell calls Stickiness. This is basically true by definition, since something that 'sticks around' is 'sticky'. It's a good thing to think about though, because some movements never get off the ground because the product is presented in a way that might be widespread and liked, but isn't 'sticky'. In evolutionary terms, this is the quality of 'survivability'. If a thing can't survive, then by definition it won't be around any longer. Gladwell thinks that what makes a thing 'sticky' isn't always apparent, and Sesame Street overcame this by extensive testing, rather than relying on their intuition.
3. The Power of Context
For any idea to 'tip', context is crucial. As with viral epidemics (I'm writing this during the Coronavirus crisis), social epidemics happen when there's the right ingredients of a certain idea, it's presentation and spread, and the context in which it finds itself. This is, IMO, why sometimes internet news go viral when under very different circumstances it wouldn't make a back page story. Ideas that find themselves in vacuums may just take off, when in other contexts they wouldn't. At the moment, everyone in Australia is buying toilet paper. No one's quite sure why, but somehow an idea started, word spread to other people (through connectors probably), and in the context of Coronavirus and many unknowns about what would happen in the future, everyone started buying TP because "everyone else was". The main reason people are buying TP right now is not because they're afraid of diarrhoea or something, but because there's no TP, and you need to grab it while you can. It was a cascade effect. If you were a TP company it would be the perfect situation to manufacture, but it's not always that easy. The context is unprecedented, and out of our control, but crucial to explaining why toilet paper is out of stock.
I liked what Gladwell says about group sizes of ~150 people. I'm very conscious of group dynamics, and how those drastically change when going from 3 to 4 to 5 to ... 12 to 15 to 20, etc. It's not a linear change; there are changes that are 'phase transitions', where something tips and the group can no longer function the same way. At a certain number every person was heard, but a small change in number can switch the group to one in which one or two dominate and everyone else becomes an observer. Gladwell talks mostly about the number 150, and how human biology suggests that that's the number of people with whom we can have meaningful relationships, and groups that surpass 150 (whether work places, churches, clubs, etc) will start to form isolated subgroups, and lose a certain kind of cohesiveness. I've almost always only spent much time thinking about group dynamics of <20 people, but the 150 dynamic is very interesting too and has implications for organisations, etc.
I hadn't heard about suicides in Micronesia, but that was really interesting to learn about. I'm not at all surprised though that a novel idea could find itself in a receptor context and spread exponentially. That's how the world works. And it makes me think about how we cultivate our families and workplace cultures. The effectiveness of preemption, when it comes to stamping out certain practices, is so hard to measure, and yet theoretically must make such a difference. A little leaven leavens the whole lump.
I enjoyed this book a lot. It was nice to read something that was written before the internet... uh... tipped. I think some of our recent social studies have been a bit lazy and relied too much on social media and big data, and Gladwell's perspective in TTP gets back to the basics of the principles that have been at work for 1000s of years. It's interesting that 'word of mouth' is still, after all the technological changes in the past 20 years, the most effective method of advertising, and perhaps more so in a world in which other means of advertising are cheap and easy. One to one relationships are hard to make, and harder to fake.
Perhaps this book could have benefited from incorporating the ideas of memetics and evolutionary sociology. I'd be curious to hear Gladwell's 2020 thoughts on his 2000 ideas, and how those might have changed in light of the internet and social media movements.
For my own record, I'm listing a few points to remember and think about.
1. The Law of the Few
According to Gladwell, epidemics happen because of a few people, not because everyone just starts doing something. These people have key influences on others, being that they naturally connect many people, naturally disseminate information and advice, and naturally convince other people. The hoi polloi, for the most part, just get caught up in what's happening, but the Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen are the true key factors in any epidemic.
a. Connectors - people who have lots of connections and relationships. They do this naturally, without conscious effort. Gladwell isn't saying saying that we should be more like them, just that they exist, and we can recognise them if we know what to look for.
b. Mavens - people who have a strong desire to impart information and 'help' to others. They're really concerned about accurate product info, or best deals, etc.
c. Salesmen - charismatic people, able to influence others.
2. The Stickiness Factor
Ideas that reach a tipping point and become social epidemics have a quality that Gladwell calls Stickiness. This is basically true by definition, since something that 'sticks around' is 'sticky'. It's a good thing to think about though, because some movements never get off the ground because the product is presented in a way that might be widespread and liked, but isn't 'sticky'. In evolutionary terms, this is the quality of 'survivability'. If a thing can't survive, then by definition it won't be around any longer. Gladwell thinks that what makes a thing 'sticky' isn't always apparent, and Sesame Street overcame this by extensive testing, rather than relying on their intuition.
3. The Power of Context
For any idea to 'tip', context is crucial. As with viral epidemics (I'm writing this during the Coronavirus crisis), social epidemics happen when there's the right ingredients of a certain idea, it's presentation and spread, and the context in which it finds itself. This is, IMO, why sometimes internet news go viral when under very different circumstances it wouldn't make a back page story. Ideas that find themselves in vacuums may just take off, when in other contexts they wouldn't. At the moment, everyone in Australia is buying toilet paper. No one's quite sure why, but somehow an idea started, word spread to other people (through connectors probably), and in the context of Coronavirus and many unknowns about what would happen in the future, everyone started buying TP because "everyone else was". The main reason people are buying TP right now is not because they're afraid of diarrhoea or something, but because there's no TP, and you need to grab it while you can. It was a cascade effect. If you were a TP company it would be the perfect situation to manufacture, but it's not always that easy. The context is unprecedented, and out of our control, but crucial to explaining why toilet paper is out of stock.
I liked what Gladwell says about group sizes of ~150 people. I'm very conscious of group dynamics, and how those drastically change when going from 3 to 4 to 5 to ... 12 to 15 to 20, etc. It's not a linear change; there are changes that are 'phase transitions', where something tips and the group can no longer function the same way. At a certain number every person was heard, but a small change in number can switch the group to one in which one or two dominate and everyone else becomes an observer. Gladwell talks mostly about the number 150, and how human biology suggests that that's the number of people with whom we can have meaningful relationships, and groups that surpass 150 (whether work places, churches, clubs, etc) will start to form isolated subgroups, and lose a certain kind of cohesiveness. I've almost always only spent much time thinking about group dynamics of <20 people, but the 150 dynamic is very interesting too and has implications for organisations, etc.
I hadn't heard about suicides in Micronesia, but that was really interesting to learn about. I'm not at all surprised though that a novel idea could find itself in a receptor context and spread exponentially. That's how the world works. And it makes me think about how we cultivate our families and workplace cultures. The effectiveness of preemption, when it comes to stamping out certain practices, is so hard to measure, and yet theoretically must make such a difference. A little leaven leavens the whole lump.
I enjoyed this book a lot. It was nice to read something that was written before the internet... uh... tipped. I think some of our recent social studies have been a bit lazy and relied too much on social media and big data, and Gladwell's perspective in TTP gets back to the basics of the principles that have been at work for 1000s of years. It's interesting that 'word of mouth' is still, after all the technological changes in the past 20 years, the most effective method of advertising, and perhaps more so in a world in which other means of advertising are cheap and easy. One to one relationships are hard to make, and harder to fake.
Perhaps this book could have benefited from incorporating the ideas of memetics and evolutionary sociology. I'd be curious to hear Gladwell's 2020 thoughts on his 2000 ideas, and how those might have changed in light of the internet and social media movements.