ENGL 304 Review

Here is a review of Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point I did for ENGL 304. I'm submitting it here for extra credit.

Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point is a fast-paced read. Written by a New Yorker journalist and former science reporter, the book is not short on pizzazz and rhetorical turns of phrase. It is clearly written for the general audience, as evidenced both by its position on the New York Times Bestseller List and its style and content. Not surprisingly, Gladwell seeks to scientifically explain socio-cultural phenomena for the layman. As the book unfolds, it becomes clear that the task is daunting.
Gladwell postulates that “epidemics,” or quickly spreading social and cultural phenomena, come about because of a very small number of people. These extremely influential individuals come in three flavors: connectors, mavens, and salesmen. Gladwell explains the nature and function of each of the three in detail and outlines how, in any epidemic we can imagine, those three have interacted with one another in order to create an explosion of popular interest. For example, a brand of shoes called “Hush Puppies” was a popular brand in the 1950s with the white, upper-middle-class suburban scene. As the counterculture movement of the 1960s gained ascendancy in the public eye, however, Hush Puppies began to lose their luster. By the 1980s enough social trends had come and gone that Hush Puppies were simply another brand amongst thousands, one that financially broke even simply because of a sentimental value that aging Americans placed on the shoe. But when Greenwich Village yuppies in the early 1990s began wearing Hush Puppies as a stylistic choice, Gladwell’s three types of people leapt into action and spread the Hush Puppy fad from a hip corner of New York to the whole country. This example is a compelling case study in Gladwell’s theory of social epidemics.
Beyond the three types of people, there are factors which help create epidemics. The Stickiness Factor is that which renders the specific content of an idea or product memorable. Gladwell uses an interesting example from Sesame Street in this section (but you must read the book to see what it is!). The Power of Context demonstrates the importance of the environment surrounding an epidemic to its eventual spread or collapse. For example, New York City’s government focused on reducing petty crimes in the early 1990s in order to change the environment of the city from one of disorder to one of order. As a result, major crime rates dropped dramatically. That is the Power of Context.
Gladwell adopts a definitely sociological angle in this book. Contrary to the book’s marketing and some isolated reviews, it is not a business or career piece in focus or intent. Gladwell writes for the joy of expounding on interesting pieces of our world, much like an honest sociologist. This joy shines through in his effective writing, but sometimes betrays Gladwell insofar as it removes him from a definite scientific approach. Consider this excerpt as an illustration:

We have, in our minds, a very specific, biological, notion of what contagiousness means. But if there can be epidemics of crime or epidemics of fashion, there must be all kinds of things just as contagious as viruses. Have you ever thought about yawning, for instance? Yawning is a surprisingly powerful act. Just by reading the two yawns in the previous two sentences--and the two additional yawns in this sentence--a good number of you will probably yawn within the next few minutes. Even as I'm writing this I've yawned twice. If you're reading this in a public place, and you've just yawned, chances are that a good proportion of everyone who saw you yawn is now yawning too, and a good proportion of the people watching the people who watched you yawn are now yawning as well, and on and on, in a ever-widening, yawning circle.
As we can see, Gladwell’s style and objective is sociology, but his arguments lean heavily enough on anecdotes (all of which are true and fascinating) to push the book away from serious scholarship and into fascinating popular nonfiction. This is unfortunate. The reader hopes to be swayed by his arguments but must, in the end, concede that his worldview is just as informed as the next gifted layman. This is not to say that Gladwell is wrong. He simply does not have the authority of a seasoned academic.
There is no doubt that Gladwell’s style is compelling. He writes with poise and confidence, indulging the reader’s questions as they rise and aptly leading us down the tracks of his trains of thought. He argues forcefully. Unfortunately, force does not equal truth. There is nothing in the book that immunizes it from being deconstructed by another pseudo-scientific tome later down the road. And his book is precisely that—pseudo-scientific. Gladwell’s approach is to meticulously collect interesting anecdotal evidence and apply it to his thesis. But since he hasn’t put together empirical data or interviewed dozens of sociological experts, his argument remains interesting and anecdotal, and not scientifically persuasive. It isn’t hard to imagine another gifted writer writing a book “proving” that fads are actually democratic and not epidemic, and indeed, there are no doubt books on the shelves now that deny Gladwell’s thesis in definite terms (books refuting bestsellers are often bestsellers themselves, and The Tipping Point is nine years old). As a result, I recommend businesses hesitate before using The Tipping Point as key part of their sales strategy.
This book relates to a college audience insofar as it is a matter of curiosity. I think Gladwell’s approach of pseudo-sociology appeals especially well to students, people who are just now formulating their worldviews. As to whether it relates to Purdue specifically, I would say that it does not. There is not a great deal of particular emphasis on one issue or another that relates to Purdue in any special way, so far as I could tell.