I've always been one. And yes, it's true that children really do read at night by flashight under the covers -or at least I did. One of my earliest memories is of "reading" one of my mother's books - I could make out just a few words on each page (probably "the" "and" and "a") but oh, what a thrill...
Although I read constantly, I rarely write about what I read. But Malcolm's Gladwell's The Tipping Point recently caught my attention. The basic premise of the book is that much about social change can be viewed through the lens of an epidemic. He writes that epidemics have three traits - contagiousness, little causes which have big effects, and that changes happen all at once, not gradually. The place where everything changes all at once is called the tipping point.
He explores the tipping point of word-of-mouth social epidemics - which he considers the most important form of human communication - using examples from the midnight ride of Paul Revere to the Hush Puppy fad in the late 1990s (who kenw?) to the company that makes Gor-Tex, to Sesame Street to the decline of crime in NYC.
I liked Paul Revere analogy the best - a piece of extrodinary news traveled a long distance in a very short period of time mobilizing an entire region to arms. What I hadn't known was there was another rider, William Dawes who who rode south and west instead of north and west with the same message. But Dawes message didn't get out, and the British forces weren't met by American revolutionaries.
Gladwell says that the reason is that Dawes didn't have the kind of social gifts that Revere had, so the news he carried didn't "tip."
He proposes three archtypes
Connectors - who know lots of people and have a gift for bringing people together
Mavens - who know a lot about particular subjects, and like to help people
Salespeople - who have the skills to persuade the unconvinced
and makes a case that since Revere was a connector type, he was able to succeed where Dawes didn't. They rode the same distance at the same time with the same news. Even though Revere only (ok, "only") rode 13 miles, the news travelled overnight as far as Worcester, because it spread like a virus - those who Revere informed in turn informed others who in turn informed others... So when the British marched toward Lexington they met resistance all along the west on the route
Revere travelled. On the other - Dawson's - so few fought the following day that historians speculated that the area was pro-British area. But it wasn't, they just hadn't gotten the news.
Anyway, that's the book recommendation for today. The writing in The Tipping Point is much better than in his more recent work, Blink!. I've followed Gladwell's for many years now - primarily in the New Yorker - and in the summer of 2003 even had some email correspondance with him when he was looking for information about the discrimation faced by many orchestral women brass players). I passed along quite a few contacts, and was happy to see that he included Abbie Conant's story as a short chapter at the very end of Blink.
