The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

Kitap Kulubunun bulusma tarihi ve saati: September 2007
Kitap Kulubunun bulusma yeri: Barnes and Noble Burlington
Tartisilacak Kitap: The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

This celebrated New York Times bestseller -- is a book that is changing the way Americans think about selling products and disseminating ideas.

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Title: The Tipping PointAuthor: Malcolm GladwellPublisher: Back BayCopyright: 2002ISBN: 0316346624Pages: 301Price: $15.00Rating: 60%
Malcolm Gladwell, a staff writer for the New Yorker, has a way with words. He also has a way with ideas, and in this book posits an interesting concept: that major changes occur when things reach a "tipping point" (or "the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point"). This idea is similar to that of the "paradigm shift", which is generally applied to science and our understanding of the world, but Gladwell attempts to show how it affects more mundane things: the sale of Hush Puppies shoes, epidemics, or the fall of crime in New York.
The first example in the book - that of how Hush Puppies went from being a moribund brand, sold only to the un-hip, to a hugely successful national brand, thanks to a handful of downtown New York trendsetters - is a prime example of how such shifts can occur. A group of "opinion makers" started wearing these shoes; others saw them and copied the style, with people even driving to out-of-the-way places to buy up stocks of Hush Puppies. Then a few fashion designers used them on the walkway, and visibility reached the "tipping point". The brand then experienced a renewal that, to this day, astounds even those in the company, who had been ready to throw in the towel.
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.
Gladwell should also talk about what I'll call the "dipping point", that point in a book when the reader starts paying less attention because of information overload. For me, this started on page 112, when Gladwell had already spent far too many pages trying to convince me that "stickiness" was a key factor in the success of Sesame Street and Blue's Clues. Stickiness seems to be that indescribable, yet analyzable, factor that keeps you attention "stuck" on something. In this case, it is what keeps pre-schoolers glued to the TV screen. But this seems to have little to do with any "tipping point"; sure, it may attract and hold people, and contribute to the popularity of these shows, but I dipped as Gladwell stretched this example out over too many pages.
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. Balderdash! Goetz was mad as hell, and was not going to take it any more.