But Gladwell then strays from this concept, talking about Paul Revere's famous ride to warn patriots that "the British are coming". Gladwell says that this event "is perhaps the most famous historical example of a word-of-mouth epidemic." But this doesn't fit in his other descriptions of "tipping points". After all, Revere's ride was a single incident - albeit an important one - but not one where anything "tipped". He alerted lots of people, in part because he knew them and was known, but there was no accumulation effect that caused this "ride" to have its famous results.
For stickiness he talks about the Sesame Street and Blue's Clues television programs. The creators of those shows had some powerful intuitions about how to reach young minds, and in how to make ideas stick there. When they made the effort to measure the impact of their intuitions, they discovered many important cases where they were wrong.
The problem is that when Gladwell talks about people, he is sticky; when he talks about technology and processes, he dips. Chapter 2, The Law of the Few, talks about "connectors, mavens and salesmen", or three types of people who help spread ideas. Gladwell is in awe of all these people, and his prose is energetic. Yet when he describes the focus groups of pre-schoolers watching Sesame Street, it just gets turgid.
Gladwell approaches the dramatic fall in crime in New York as a "tipping point", but tries to discount every meta-change that helped drop the crime rate: increased police presence, tougher sentencing, and, above all, a vibrant economy that lowered unemployment drastically among the underclass, those who commit crimes. He prefers to believe in some mystical force that "tipped" everyone from being mean to being nice. He claims that the first element that caused the tip was a crackdown on graffiti on subway cars: graffiti was cleaned off subway cars, showing the taggers that they would no longer be tolerated. Then it was a crackdown on fare-beating; stopping people from cheating obviously gave them new moral values. He loses me when, talking about the 1984 incident when Bernard Goetz shot four youths who were harassing him on a subway train, he claims this: "...the showdown on the subway between Bernie Goetz and those four youths had very little to do, in the end, with the tangled psychological pathology of Goetz, and very little as well to do with the background and poverty of the four youths who accosted him, and everything to do with the message sent by the graffiti on the walls and the disorder at the turnstiles." This after describing how Goetz, after a stern upbringing and being mugged and injured, got a gun, with clear plans to become a vigilante. This, after describing how the four youths had all been previously arrested for assault, and how at least two of them were on drugs at the time. But Gladwell finds nothing more than graffiti and turnstile-jumping to be the cause. Goetz was mad as hell, and was not going to take it anymore.
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sayak8812 (student)
