Idea epidemics

Then again, as far as instruments of social control and manipulation go, "The Tipping Point" is a pretty thumping-good read. Gladwell's style is nuanced yet casual, as befits a New Yorker guy, and he has that rare gift of the top-drawer fact writer: free-floating curiosity about the world and the way it's put together. He's honestly, and probably innocently, interested in the mechanics of marketing and buzz; you get the impression that he would've written the book whether or not anyone thought that social and sales engineers would pile all over one another trying to snatch a copy from the stacks. Moreover, when he concentrates on bite-size ideas rather than grand theories, he can be an ace synthesist.

Specifically, Gladwell has an interesting take on social scientist Stanley Milgram's "six degrees of separation" research, which seems to indicate that everyone on earth is connected through Kevin Bacon. Or rather that people everywhere, including Bacon, are connected through far fewer and more direct channels than you might have thought possible. In the 1960s, Milgram sent out letters to random people in Ohio requesting that they mail a reply either to a certain stockbroker in Boston, if they knew him, or to someone else whom they thought might know him. Most of the responses that eventually arrived had gone through only five intermediary steps, and Milgram noticed as well that a large number of them were funneled to the stockbroker by a single person in Boston. Gladwell identifies that sort of character as a Connector -- someone who is skilled at the "weak exchange" of casual acquaintanceship and who therefore knows a huge number of people. Just about everyone, he says, knows at least one Connector; and to a great extent these Connectors provide the conduits through which societies exchange information and opinion. They talk to everybody. If you get a Connector on the case with you, it's easy to tip stuff.

Of course, we already knew that; otherwise Brown wouldn't have instituted the policy of sending special copies of ... that magazine to a select A-list of buzzhounds so they'd talk about it. If we didn't know that, nobody would be able to figure out where to send review copies of "The Tipping Point." But what Gladwell suggests is that it's not only the P.R. demimonde that operates this way -- it's all of society. For instance, on the night that Paul Revere made his midnight ride, a man named William Dawes went galloping off in the other direction to muster the militias to the west of Boston. Revere's ride stirred up an army, while something like three people showed up from the towns Dawes visited. Paul Revere, Gladwell says, was a classic Connector: He knew everybody, and so he was able to storm into one village after another, banging on all the right doors and calling people out by name.

Connectors are supposed to be the vectors through which political movements spread, through which we hook up with friends and dates and connect with potential employers, through which restaurants and bars (say) become hot and styles become manifest. And in fact, that might be a far more elegant way to look at things than the old just-so theory of group dynamics, according to which we assume that if we're hanging out at the Loop Lounge with our pal Steve on a Friday night it's because the Loop rules and Steve is just a helluva guy. More elegant, but also more impoverished and less humane -- but that's progress for you. And it certainly helps explain the degree to which logrolling can get you ahead in this world.

Revere was also, Gladwell continues, a Maven -- a person who collects and organizes vast stores of useful information and shares it with the people around him. He knew all about what the British were doing and was zealous about digging up new intelligence. The Maven is the other type of individual you'd want to fax your press releases to. A Maven recommends things and people listen; and just as with the Connector, we're all supposed to know one. A third type is the Salesman, who has a genius for selling you on ideas or opinions.

But these last two categories are a bit dodgier: Instead of explaining anything new about the way the world works, they just take elements of the exchange relationship and turn them into basic human types. Revere was, if anything, a man deeply involved in the affairs around him -- a man, like Gladwell, with interests. But Gladwell's example of the contemporary Maven is a guy who knows everything about how to get great deals on consumer goods; he's merely a Smart Shopper. And while Gandhi would come off in Gladwell's theory as a consummate Salesman, the one in Gladwell's account is a guy who made a bundle closing real estate deals -- a small-"s" salesman.

And in any case there's a fourth category afoot in "The Tipping Point": the Social Engineer, who tries to sell you on the idea that most people are basically cells in a huge, dumb overmind and that an elite should be able to determine what that mind thinks about. An example from history would be Hitler, although perhaps that's unfair: He qualifies more properly as a Salesman -- yanking on that well-placed lever, spreading that virus.

Essentially, the book succeeds wherever Gladwell is content simply to follow the epidemic of the trend through its human vectors and gets icky wherever he widens the scope of his analysis, making grand observations about human behavior and how blithely it can be manipulated. It's entirely true that people can be influenced en masse by flummery, propaganda and bizarre enthusiasms. Since Charles MacKay's "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" was first published in 1841, the subject has been perennially interesting -- and inarguably valuable. A lot of people have dealt with it, including Gladwell's New Yorker colleague Bill Buford (in his 1991 study of soccer hooligans, "Among the Thugs") and the entire flourishing field of memetics researchers (including Richard Dawkins, Aaron Lynch and Richard Brodie).

But heretofore there's been a general consensus among authors on the subject that the contagion of essentially unexamined ideas among large groups of people is, you know, fairly serious stuff, and that the unthinking herd is not the ideal unit of human organization. Buford, who rampaged with a herd of soccer toughs through the streets of Turin, London and Sardinia, wrote, "A crowd reveals our Darwinian selves, primal hordes suddenly liberated by the sway of the pack. A crowd reveals our Freudian selves, regressing to a state of primitive, elemental urgency." Gladwell, who watches the crowds on 42nd Street from the 21st floor of the Condi Nast building, might not fully understand the implications of what he's saying when he speaks of "spreading a virus" through groups of people. One assumes that Buford, who ended up collapsed in a Sardinian gutter with riot police swinging well-placed levers up and down on his skull, understands the idea a little more fully. Admittedly, as an author Buford is no Rodman or Collins either -- nor even a Chopra nor a Cartland. But still: $1 million ... Here's a tip: Don't believe the hype.

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