Tipping Point

The Tipping Point Review

The book on which I did my book review is The Tipping Point written by Malcolm Gladwell. He seems very educated and driven to explain all different kinds of people and aspects that are connected to Tipping Points. The books content contains several important kinds of factors for tipping points: The Law of the Few, Stickiness Factor, the Power of Context, etc. In my review, I will briefly and thoroughly discuss these different factors and the people that help influence them. I will also credit the validity of the sources that Gladwell uses. This book is an amazing example of different tipping points in society that clearly shows readers, how a small idea can cause a tidal wave of movement. Our textbook defines the Meme theory as "an idea or product that enters the consciousness of people over time" (Solomon, 2010, p595). This is exactly what Gladwell used to describe the Tipping Point. The book uses the examples of Hush Puppies, who became an instant sensation virtually overnight using no promotion and advertising. This is an example of what the book defines as a "retro brand," it is "a brand from a prior historical period that triggers nostalgia" (Solomon, 2010, p119). For example, nobody knew how or why it happened, but the shoes reached the point of "critical mass" and became a huge fashion statement (Gladwell, 2000).

The subject within this book is, that certain things such as ideas, products, messages, and behaviors spread just like viruses do (Gladwell, 2000). He is trying to demonstrate that these ideas and products can be integrated into society and then within an extremely short amount of time become an epidemic. In his book, he described three characteristics of tipping points: "One, contagiousness; two, the fact that little causes can have big effects; and three, that change happens not gradually but at one dramatic moment" (Gladwell, 2000). Gladwell is trying to explain these different factors and characteristics that ultimately cause the dramatic change that leads to the tipping point.

The first critical factor in the Tipping Point is the Law of the Few. These few people are capable of starting the rapidly spreading epidemics. Gladwell identifies them as Salesmen, Connectors, and Mavens. He uses the example in the book as Paul Revere's ride. What most people do not know is that a man named William Dawes also made the same trip warning people that the British were coming. Revere was one of Gladwell's examples of a connector, one who knows many people and is very trustworthy and good at getting information out. Dawes had none of these traits and was unsuccessful in his ride. Gladwell is very thorough in his writing; he starts each chapter out with an example and then goes into his description of different factors and ideas representing that example. He finally ties in everything acknowledged in that chapter back to the example. He uses an example of the "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" to explain the functions of Connectors. He uses a valid source, Brett Tjaden, a computer scientist at the University of Virginia, who explains that anyone who has ever acted can be linked to Kevin Bacon in fewer than 3 steps (Tjaden, 2000). Then Gladwell relates it back to connectors, who have many contacts and can reach many people in just a few steps. He concludes the chapter with his previous example of Paul Revere, as a connector who was more successful than William Dawes in waking colonists up to confront the British.

In the start of the Stickiness Factor chapter, Gladwell starts by mentioning the television show Sesame Street. He then ties in the previous chapter's example of Paul Revere's ride, to explain how he was a connector, and how his information "stuck" enough so that the colonists would take action. This is an example of how thoroughly Gladwell reiterates examples and notions in his book, by coming back to previous ones and programming them into the reader's memory. Back to Sesame Street, this was a great example of how the stickiness factor can become subtly changed or switched, so that it is not sticky anymore. Daniel Anderson, a valid resource from the University of Massachusetts, noticed that when preschoolers were watching TV, they were not actually sitting and staring at the screen. Instead, shorter glances were more common than longer ones. The preschoolers engaged in other various activities while also watching the show (Anderson, 2000). The Consumer Behavior book uses the term perceptual filters, which are "a factor that determines how much exposure to a particular stimulus a person accepts" (Solomon, 2010, p76). This seems to coincide with how much Sesame Street a preschooler will watch while using perceptual selection to filter out the uninteresting parts. Researchers brought two groups of five-year olds into a room, one with toys and one without, and let them watch a sesame street show. Naturally, the kids in the toy room played with the toys while watching the show, and when questioned about it later those children's TV attentive scores were exactly the same as the others. In an article by Lauchlan