长春博泽怎么样:The Next Big Thing

By ALAN WOLFE

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THE TIPPING POINT
How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference.
By Malcolm Gladwell.
279 pp. Boston:
Little, Brown & Company. $24.95.

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t's hard not to be fascinated by fads. A previously unwanted item will attract sudden, enormous, inexplicable attention. The company that provides it will run out. Pundits will read into its popularity portentous meanings for contemporary civilization. The lucky few will make fantastic sums of money. Then, as mysteriously as it appeared, the item wanes in desirability. Within a year or two, whatever it was that had sent people into a frenzy becomes the answer to a trivia question.

Fads remind us of the potential for disorder always lying behind the placid surface of daily life. Economists study fads for examples of speculative mania -- Dutch tulips, perhaps today's Nasdaq -- that inevitably result in depressions. Sociologists teach that in the middle of a fad individuals are more likely to be swayed by crowd psychology than by their own wants. Satirists find in fads human foibles writ large; Melville's ''Confidence Man'' and Twain's ''Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg'' are built around the illusions that lead people to deny what their eyes see in favor of what their hearts desire.

''The Tipping Point,'' by Malcolm Gladwell, is a lively, timely and engaging study of fads. Some of those he writes about fit snugly into the long tradition of crowd behavior: out-of-fashion Hush Puppies resurged into popularity in 1994 and '95; teenagers, despite repeated health warnings, continue to smoke and in the past few years have been doing so in increasing numbers; and in 1998 a book called ''Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood'' reached a sales mark of two and a half million copies. Some of the other phenomena analyzed by Gladwell are a bit more unusual, including the decline in crime in New York City that began under Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani. But all of them can be taken as examples of how unpredictable people can be when they find themselves in the throes of doing what everyone else is doing at the same time.

Unlike previous observers of fads, however, Gladwell, a staff writer for The New Yorker, does not emphasize what they teach us about human irrationality. He does the exact opposite. Fads, he claims, are not really fads at all. They are illustrations of what he calls ''the tipping point,'' a term that he appropriates from the highly rational language of medical science, and that he defines as the ''one dramatic moment in an epidemic when everything can change all at once.'' Ideas and products and messages and behaviors, Gladwell writes, spread just as viruses do.

Viruses are contagious, but they move through a population at something like a leisurely pace until a tipping point is reached and they explode into an epidemic. Gladwell extends the idea of the tipping point from natural to social phenomena, from epidemics to fads, insisting that we can discover the scientific principles that govern both.

BOOK EXCERPT

-- from the first chapter of 'The Tipping Point'

Gladwell calls the first such principle the Law of the Few. An idea or behavior spreads because of the unusual qualities of a few key groups of individuals. There are the connectors, networked people who know seemingly everyone and who can make or break reputations on their word alone. There are the mavens, people who acquire such detailed knowledge of a product that others turn to them repeatedly for advice. Then there are the salesmen, those whose enthusiasm for a product can send its sales spiralling upward.

The second law of fads, according to Gladwell, is the Stickiness Factor. All kinds of potential fads exist around us, but only certain ones take. ''Sesame Street'' was failing miserably with test groups when someone, as a last-ditch move, thought of blending real people with puppets. Including a map highlighting the location of the infirmary induced many Yale seniors to heed previously disregarded warnings about getting a tetanus shot. At a time of message overload, finding a way to make something stick is part of making it survive.

Finally, Gladwell discusses the Power of Context. One reason crime declined in New York is that officials put into practice the much-debated broken-windows theory, which held that if subways were cleaned of graffiti and windows were repaired, people would begin to obey the law. Altering the context altered the result. Gladwell offers another example: the Rule of 150. Groups smaller than 150 cannot influence many outside them. Larger groups tend to become impersonal. Knowing that, we begin to realize that one can create a large fad by first creating a series of smaller ones.

Gladwell, who made his career in journalism as a science writer, has a knack for explaining psychological experiments clearly; ''The Tipping Point'' is worth reading just for what it tells us about how we try to make sense out of the world. But its central premise, no matter how often asserted, fails to persuade. Gladwell's rules of epidemic behavior are common sense dressed up as science. We do not need to know about how a virus spreads to know that networking is important, that good salesmen move products or that most ad campaigns fail. And some of his ideas -- for example, that 150 is the ideal size of a human group because 1 to 150 also happens to be the ratio of the size of our neocortex to the size of our entire brain -- are just fanciful.

A virus spreads by replicating itself into as many hosts as it can find. The tipping point it reaches is quantitative in nature; matters achieve epidemic proportions when replication takes off mathematically. The social tipping points of everyday life, by contrast, are qualitative. What makes them fascinating is not the number of times things repeat themselves but the fact that events taking place after the tipping point is reached are not the same as those that took place before.

Consider the most well known of social tipping points, though one that Gladwell does not analyze: partly integrated neighborhoods segregating themselves when whites come to feel that too many blacks live there. A white person who sells a house to an African-American because the latter makes the best offer is ostensibly engaged in the same behavior as a white person who sells a house to an African-American because he is in a panic and just wants to unload his property at any price. But subjectively, their actions are completely different. Before the tipping point, the white seller is rational. Afterwards, his consciousness has changed, and he acts out of fear, ignorance or both. The tipping point takes on a life of its own because human beings, the transmittal agents, unlike viruses, have minds of their own.

Forcing science where science does not belong results not only in misunderstanding; it could also cause harm if taken too seriously. Gladwell points to a rash of Young Werther suicides that took place in Micronesia in the 1970's and 80's. Just like crime or smoking, suicide is contagious, he writes, citing the studies of a University of California sociologist who found that suicides increase after reports of suicide appear in the newspapers.

As with any form of social behavior, there will always be an imitative factor. But it is simply wrong to say that the very essence of suicide is a private language between members of a common subculture. Suicide may not have any essence, but if it has one, it is a private act of a person with serious mental disturbances and not a language at all. Anyone who believes that suicide is contagious the way the flu is contagious may well be distracted from giving the kind of attention that a potential suicide victim needs, the help to deal with problems inside, not behaviors outside.

I wish Malcolm Gladwell had chosen to use his considerable skills as a journalist to describe more examples of actual tipping points. In reaching instead for theory, he reaches well beyond where he, or anyone else, can safely travel. The theory of tipping points requires that ''we reframe the way we think about the world,'' he writes. Actually, the way we think about the world has to reframe the often stilted theories we develop about it.