Hush Puppies, Sesame Street, the fax machine, the rapid downturn in New York crime - what do all these phenomena have in common? Easy. According to Gladwell, they are 'products and messages and behaviours [that] spread just like viruses'. While most epidemiologists would raise a querulous eyebrow or two at his attempt to claim diverse social behaviours as epidemics, it is an enticing - though far from original idea - that Gladwell manages to enliven with a series of interesting sketches and profiles.
The way in which individuals and crowds can be manipulated by environmental cues and emotional contagion, how an idea can be more or less subliminally transmitted, has been explored abundantly by behavioural psychologists. The concept of the moral epidemic also runs through a smorgasbord of historical and sociological investigations of panic and revolution, as well as more journalistic incursions into pop manias, fads and cults, such as Charles Mackay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions. Unencumbered by almost all of these previous studies, Gladwell sets about using the language of contagion to unpack the Tipping Point for some runaway trends and commercial best sellers, proposing three general rules.
One: select category of individuals, 'The Few' are the arch disseminators of epidemics. They are connectors (movers and shakers with fingers in many different world-pies); mavens (ever-helpful oracles, information brokers, who dispense up-to-the-minute news) and salesmen (charismatic persuaders). They are all, at root, translators who infuse a message with a 'deeper meaning' before passing it on.
Two: epidemics require a product or idea that is 'sticky'. Stickiness is not necessarily synonymous with cleverness or originality, it is often a produced by tweaking and inflecting a message in ways that appear 'counter-intuitive'.
Three: epidemics are sensitive to, and products of, environmental locales. Just as New York's war on subway crime succeeded because of zero tolerance on graffiti and fare dodging, other minor signals serve as invitations for all social viruses to spread.
'The actual content of your thoughts,' Gladwell writes, are less important, in the end, in guiding your actions than the immediate context of your behaviour.' Criminality and consumption are, like so many other behaviours, functions of the where and the when.
Gladwell bolsters his typology with enough anecdotes and findings, but these details are inevitably more alluring than the axioms he deduces. His attempt to practice what he preaches, applying his model to the roots of the teenage smoking epidemic, is misplaced and disingenuous. Fortunately, this vein of Transatlantic pragmatism - the book is mysteriously packaged as a DIY primer to tipping one's own epidemic - is only slightly grating, and there are enough real ideas to make amends.
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