But if there is difficulty and volatility in the world of the Tipping Point, there is a large measure of hopefulness as well. Merely by manipulating the size of a group, we can dramatically improve its receptivity to new ideas. By tinkering with the presentation of information, we can significantly improve its stickiness. Simply by finding and reaching those few special people who hold so much social power, we can shape the course of social epidemics. In the end, Tipping Points are a reaffirmation of the potential for change and the power of intelligent action. Look at the world around you. It may seem like an immovable, implacable place. It is not. With the slightest push—in just the right place—it can be tipped.
AFTERWORD
Tipping Point Lessons
from the Real World
Not long after The Tipping Point came out, I happened to talk to an epidemiologist, a man who had spent the better part of his professional life battling the AIDS epidemic. He was a thoughtful fellow, and frustrated in the way that you can imagine someone would be who has had to deal, on a daily basis, with such a terrible disease. We were sitting in a café talking about my book, which he had read, and then he said something startling. “I wonder if we would have been better off if we had never discovered the AIDS virus at all?” I don’t think he meant that literally, or that he regretted the countless lives that have been saved or prolonged by anti HIV drugs and the AIDS test. What he meant was this: that the AIDS epidemic is fundamentally a social phenomenon. It spreads because of the beliefs and social structures and poverty and prejudices and personalities of a community, and sometimes getting caught up in the precise biological characteristics of a virus merely serves as a distraction; we might have halted the spread of AIDS far more effectively just by focusing on those beliefs and social structures and poverty and prejudices and personalities. And when he said that, a lightbulb went on inside my head: that’s what I was trying to say in The Tipping Point!
A book, I was taught long ago in English class, is a living and breathing document that grows richer with each new reading. But I never quite believed that until I wrote The Tipping Point. I wrote my book without any clear expectation of who would read it, or what, if anything, it would be useful for. It seemed presumptuous to think otherwise. But in the year since its publication, I have been inundated with the comments of readers. I have received thousands of e-mails through my Web site (www.gladwell.com). I have spoken at conferences and retreats and sales meetings and chatted with Internet entrepreneurs and shoe designers and community activists and movie executives and countless others — and each time I have learned something new about my book, and about why it seems to have touched such a chord.
In New Jersey, the philanthropist Sharon Karmazin bought three hundred copies of The Tipping Point and sent one to every public library in the state, promising to fund any ideas they could come up with that were inspired by my book. “Use the thinking in the book to create something new,” Karmazin told librarians. “Don’t just give us something you wanted to do anyway.” Within a few months, “Tipping Point” grants totaling close to $100,000 had been given out to twenty one different libraries. In Roselle, the public library is on a side street, hidden away behind shrubbery, and so the library got a grant to put up signs around town to direct people to the library. Another library used its grant to teach the Connectors among the group of seniors who use the library to surf the Net — betting they will draw in other patrons. Still another library bought Spanish language books and materials, hoping to create a draw for an underserved community in their town. None of the grants was more than a few thousand dollars, nor were the ideas themselves more than modest — but that was the point.
In California, Ken Futernick, a professor of education at California State University at Sacramento, says he was inspired by The Tipping Point to come up with an idea for attracting teachers to troubled schools. “There is an interesting stalemate,” Futernick told me. “Good principals say, ‘I can’t go off to a hard school unless I have good teachers,’ and good teachers say, ‘I won’t go off to a hard school unless there is a good principal.’ There have been a lot of efforts, like forgivable loans, that thrash around and don’t ever go anywhere.” In some schools in low income parts of Oakland where Futernick has been focusing his efforts, he says that 40 percent of the teachers may lack credentials, working only on an “emergency” two year basis. “I ask teachers, ‘What would it take for you to go to one of these schools, in a very low income area, lots of single parents, not a safe part of town?’” He went on. “Salary incentives? They say maybe. Lower class size? They say yeah, maybe. All the things I listed were sort of attractive, but I didn’t get the sense that any one of them would be enough to get people to take the assignment.” It would be easy to conclude, from all of that, that teachers are undedicated and selfish, not willing to work in those places where they are most needed. But what would happen, Futernick wondered, if he changed the context of the request? His new idea, which he hopes to put in place over the next year in Oakland, is for principals to be recruited for difficult schools and then given a year to put together a team of qualified teachers drawn from good schools for their new assignment — a team that would go into the new school together. On playing fields and battlegrounds, challenges that would be daunting and impossible if faced alone are suddenly possible when tackled in a close knit group. The people haven’t changed, but the way in which the task appears to them has. Futernick thinks the same principle ought to hold true in the classroom, that teachers would be willing to take on a daunting assignment if they felt they were surrounded by other experienced, high quality teachers. That’s a lesson from The Tipping Point that I never thought could have application in the inner city of Oakland.
One of the things that motivated me to write The Tipping Point was the mystery of word of mouth — a phenomenon that everyone seemed to agree was important but no one seemed to know how to define. It is on this subject that readers have talked to me the most over the last year, and on which I have thought the most as well. What is now obvious to me — but was not at the time I wrote The Tipping Point — is that we are about to enter the age of word of mouth, and that, paradoxically, all of the sophistication and wizardry and limitless access to information of the New Economy is going to lead us to rely more and more on very primitive kinds of social contacts. Relying on the Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen in our life is the way we deal with the complexity of the modern world. This is a function of many different factors and changes in our society, of which I’d like to talk about three: the rise of isolation, particularly among adolescents; the rise of immunity in communication; and the particularly critical role of the Maven in the modern economy.
Understanding the Age of Isolation
At 9:20 A.M., on March 5, 2001, fifteen year old Andy Williams opened fire with a .22 caliber long barrel revolver from the bathroom of his high school in Santee, California. He fired thirty rounds over six minutes, first into the bathroom itself, and then into an adjoining courtyard, killing two students and hitting thirteen other people. He was a skinny, jug eared freshman, new to town, with a silver necklace reading MOUSE, and afterward, as always seems to happen in these cases, his friends and teachers said they could not believe that someone so quiet and mild mannered could have committed such an act of violence.
I wrote, in The Tipping Point, about adolescent epidemics, and I used as a case study the epidemic of teenage suicide that raged for many years on the islands of Micronesia. I could not find a more dramatic example of the proclivity of teenagers to get caught up in mindless and highly contagious rituals of self destruction. The Micronesian epidemic started with a single high profile suicide — a love triangle involving a charismatic high born youth and a dramatic scene at a funeral — and soon other boys were committing suicide in precisely the same way, and for reasons that seemed preposterously trivial. I thought that the recent rise in teen smoking, in the West, was our form of this kind of epidemic. But in truth the analogy wa
s inexact. In Micronesia, teens were doing something entirely unique to their own culture. They were not mimicking an adult practice or reacting to something the adult world was imposing on them. They were simply following the internal rules of their culture, as if they were entirely blind to what adults said and did. Teen smoking, by contrast, is quite different. It’s an adult practice that is cool among teens precisely because of its adult roots. And teens smoke, in part, in reaction to what adults preach to them about the evils of smoking. The first is an epidemic in isolation. The second is an epidemic in reaction. I thought we couldn’t have the first kind of epidemic among western teens. I was wrong. We now have the school shooting epidemic.
The school massacre at Columbine High in Littleton, Colorado, happened on April 20, 1999. In the twenty two months that followed, there were nineteen separate incidents of school violence across the United States — ten of them foiled, fortunately, before anyone got hurt — each patterned, almost eerily, on the Columbine shootings. Seth Trickey, a seventh grader in Fort Gibson, Oklahoma, who pulled out a 9mm semiautomatic handgun and fired fifteen rounds into a group of classmates in December of 1999, was so obsessed with the Columbine shootings that before the incident he was receiving psychological counseling. A seventeen year old in Millbrae, California, was arrested after threatening to “do a Columbine” at his school. Police found an arsenal of fifteen guns and rifles in his home. Joseph DeGuzman, in Cupertino, California, planned an attack on his school in January of 2001, and later told police that the Columbine gunmen were “the only thing that’s real.” Three boys were arrested in Kansas the following month, and police found bomb making materials, rifles, and ammunition in their homes, including three black trench coats just like the coats worn by the Columbine gunmen. Two days later, in Fort Collins, Colorado, police found another cache of ammunition and guns. The boys involved had been overheard plotting to “redo Columbine.”
In the press, this wave of shootings and would be shootings has sometimes been portrayed as part of a larger wave of violence. But that’s not true: In 1992–93, there were fifty four violent deaths on public school campuses around the United States. In 2000, there were sixteen. The Columbine wave happened in a period when violence among students was down, not up. Much attention has also been paid to the social circumstances of the children involved in these incidents. Andy Williams was a lonely and often bullied boy, the product of divorce and neglect. Time magazine summed up his world as a place where “getting stoned on super strong weed like ‘bubblegum chronic’ is for some a daily deed and where ditching school to rub shoulders with the Aryan Brothers gang in the skate park is an unexceptional life choice.” But to have kids growing up in disaffection and loneliness is hardly a new development. Millions of kids who grow up just as emotionally impoverished as Andy Williams don’t walk into their school one morning and start shooting. The difference is Columbine. Andy Williams was infected by the example of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, just as the suicides of Micronesia were infected by the example of that first dramatic love triangle. It is a mistake to try to make sense of these kinds of actions by blaming influences of the outside world — in terms of broader trends of violence and social breakdown. These are epidemics in isolation: they follow a mysterious, internal script that makes sense only in the closed world that teenagers inhabit.
The best analogy to this kind of epidemic is the outbreak of food poisoning that swept through several public schools in Belgium in the summer of 1999. It started when forty two children in the Belgian town of Bornem became mysteriously ill after drinking Coca Cola and had to be hospitalized. Two days later, eight more schoolchildren fell sick in Brugge, followed by thirteen in Harelbeke the next day and forty two in Lochristi three days after that — and on and on in a widening spiral that, in the end, sent more than one hundred children to the hospital complaining of nausea, dizziness, and headaches, and forced Coca Cola into the biggest product recall in its 113 year history. Upon investigation, an apparent culprit was found. In the Coca Cola plant in Antwerp, contaminated carbon dioxide had been used to carbonate a batch of the soda’s famous syrup. But then the case got tricky: upon examination, the contaminants in the carbon dioxide were found to be sulfur compounds present at between five and seventeen parts per billion. These sulfides can cause illness, however, only at levels about a thousand times greater than that. At seventeen parts per billion, they simply impart a bad smell — like rotten eggs — which means that Belgium should have experienced nothing more than a minor epidemic of nose wrinkling. More puzzling is the fact that, in four of the five schools where the bad Coke allegedly caused illness, half the kids who got sick hadn’t actually drunk any Coke that day. Whatever went on in Belgium, in other words, probably wasn’t Coca Cola poisoning. So what was it? It was a kind of mass hysteria, a phenomenon that is not at all uncommon among schoolchildren. Simon Wessely, a psychiatrist at King’s College of Medicine in London, has been collecting reports of this kind of hysteria for about ten years and now has hundreds of examples, dating back as far as 1787, when millworkers in Lancashire suddenly took ill after they became persuaded that they were being poisoned by tainted cotton. According to Wessely, almost all cases fit a pattern. Someone sees a neighbor fall ill and becomes convinced that he is being contaminated by some unseen evil — in the past it was demons and spirits; nowadays it tends to be toxins and gases — and his fear makes him anxious. His anxiety makes him dizzy and nauseated. He begins to hyperventilate. He collapses. Other people hear the same allegation, see the “victim” faint, and they begin to get anxious themselves. They feel nauseated. They hyperventilate. They collapse, and before you know it everyone in the room is hyperventilating and collapsing. These symptoms, Wessely stresses, are perfectly genuine. It’s just that they are manifestations of a threat that is wholly imagined. “This kind of thing is extremely common,” he says, “and it’s almost normal. It doesn’t mean that you are mentally ill or crazy.” What happened in Belgium was a fairly typical example of a more standard form of contagious anxiety, possibly heightened by the recent Belgian scare over dioxin contaminated animal feed. The students’ alarm over the rotten egg odor of their Cokes, for example, is straight out of the hysteria textbooks. “The vast majority of these events are triggered by some abnormal but benign smell,” Wessely said. “Something strange, like a weird odor coming from the air conditioning.” The fact that the outbreaks occurred in schools is also typical of hysteria cases. “The classic ones always involve schoolchildren,” Wessely continued. “There is a famous British case involving hundreds of schoolgirls who collapsed during a 1980 Nottinghamshire jazz festival. They blamed it on a local farmer spraying pesticides.” There have been more than a hundred and fifteen documented hysteria cases in schools over the past three hundred years.”
Is it a mistake to take the hysterical outbreaks like the Belgian Coke scare too seriously? Not at all. It was, in part, a symptom of deeper underlying anxieties. What’s more, the children who felt sick were not faking their symptoms: they were sick. It’s just that it’s important to realize that sometimes epidemic behavior among children does not have an identifiable and rational cause: the kids get sick because other kids got sick. The post Columbine outbreak of school shootings is, in this sense, no different. It is happening because Columbine happened, and because ritualized, dramatic, self destructive behavior among teenagers — whether it involves suicide, smoking, taking a gun to school, or fainting after drinking a harmless can of Coke — has extraordinary contagious power.
My sense is that the way adolescent society has evolved in recent years has increased the potential for this kind of isolation. We have given teens more money, so they can construct their own social and material worlds more easily. We have given them more time to spend among themselves — and less time in the company of adults. We have given them e-mail and beepers and, most of all, cellular phones, so that they can fill in all the dead spots in their day — dead spots that might once have been filled with
the voices of adults — with the voices of their peers. That is a world ruled by the logic of word of mouth, by the contagious messages that teens pass among themselves. Columbine is now the most prominent epidemic of isolation among teenagers. It will not be the last.
Beware the Rise of Immunity
One of the things I didn’t talk about much in The Tipping Point, but which I have been asked about over and over again, is the effect of the Internet — in particular, e-mail — on my ideas about word of mouth. Surely, after all, e-mail seems to make the role of the Connector obsolete, or at least changes it dramatically. E-mail makes it possible for almost anyone to keep up with lots and lots of people. In fact, e-mail does make it possible to cheaply and effectively reach people — or customers — whom you might not know at all.
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