I reviewed Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink" recently, and decided that I needed to read his earlier book, "The Tipping Point." I picked it up three days ago. Let me give you the rundown.The basic premise of the book is that many things that happen in our societies can be understood using the model of an epidemic, and that if we understand how epidemics really happen, we can cause or prevent epidemics of our choosing. It's a remarkable assertion, particularly from the point of view of a person who would like to see an epidemic of liberal-voting in Alberta.Gladwell argues that epidemics should be understood as having three laws: The law of the few, the law of stickiness, and the law of context. The law of the few refers to the idea that human society is built in much the way modern file-sharing software works. He doesn't describe it this way, but this is the parallel that struck me most clearly.You'll remember Napster. The idea was to have a central database that listed the files, and their locations, to which anyone could connect. It worked well. The problem was that the legal consequences of it could be imposed on the person who owned the central database. So the second generation of file-sharing attempted to get rid of the central database. Each node on the network would share its file list with the nodes near it, and would pass search requests from one node to the next, and there would be no central authority to come down on. This created a new problem. It was slow. It was effectively like trying to send a letter, but instead of putting it in a mailbox, you just handed it to the person closest to you who was standing closer to the letter's destination, and that person did the same.Once you found what you were looking for it worked well enough, but it was bad at finding what you were looking for. So the third, and current, generation of file-sharing software came out. The strategy they employ is to choose certain nodes to act as clearing-houses of information. Most nodes do not have to know where all their neighbours are. They just need to know where the neighbours who are acting as clearing houses are. Requests for information, and the lists of files available, go to those clearing houses first, and the clearing houses share them with one another.Now, back to the tipping point. Gladwell argues that human society is designed in much the same way. Most of us are average nodes in the network. Some of us, however, fit into a category he calls "connectors." People with an unusually broad and typically shallow network of friends. They know many people, but don't know many people well. These connectors are the clearing houses that make the transmission of ideas through society more efficient. Everyone talks to their connector, and their connector talks to everyone else.But it's not only connectors Gladwell talks about. He also brings out two other unusual categories: Mavens, and Salesmen. Mavens are people who are information collectors. They are the topic-area experts. Say you wanted to buy a new car. Who would you ask for advice? That person is your car maven. Mavens are also critical because they are the way new ideas get into the network. They are the ones paying close attention at the start, before it's something that everyone knows.Salesmen are the third unusual group. A salesman is a person with charisma, often beyond their control, and who takes information and changes it to make it mass-consumption ready. For each person who comes up with a great idea, there is another person who makes others realize it is a great idea. That second person is the salesman.The basic message is that it is these three sorts of people are important: the mavens who collect new information, the salesmen who translate it for mass consumption, and the connectors who make it spread quickly, that push ideas past the tipping point into an epidemic.The second law is the stickiness factor. Gladwell argues that it's not enough for a message to be heard. The message has to stick. Using epidemiological examples, HIV is sticky, but travels the network relatively slowly. The common cold, on the other hand, travels more easily, but doesn't stick. It's usually gone in a couple of days. What you want to create or avoid, depending on the epidemic, is stickiness. The examples he uses are drawn from children's educational television, where the challenge is to make children pay attention to the learning messages in the show. Turns out there, the key to stickiness is comprehension. Kids pay attention to what they understand, and ignore what confuses them. You need to understand what makes your message sticky.The third law is the importance of context. Here, he gives the example of the "broken windows" theory of crime prevention. He talks about how the transit police in new york city managed to drastically reduce the number of crimes committed in their system by cracking down primarily on two things: fare-beaters, and graffiti. Not the most important of crimes, but they were extremely visible, and they created - the theory argues - the impression that the subway system was a place you were going to be able to get away with things. The context made people more willing to commit crimes. Plus, arresting the fare-beaters allowed them to weed out people carrying weapons, and people with outstanding warrants, which served as a crime prevention tool. The important point though, and one on which he expanded greatly in Blink, is that human beings are massively and obliviously affected by their environments. Being on a cleaner street, as he puts it, literally makes you a better citizen.He ends the book with an interesting chapter in which he applies his model to the problem of the teen smoking epidemic in the United States. His conclusions is that the current efforts to curb it are misguided, and that the trick is to make cigarettes less sticky by doing two things. One, enhance the treatment of mental illness, because a surprisingly large number of cigarette smokers are actually self-medicating. Two, pass a law requiring that the amount of nicotene in an entire pack of cigarettes must be less than the daily amount generally considered necessary to create addiction, thereby reducing the number of teens who get addicted to smoking.Those are the ideas. My review of the book is basically the same as my review of Blink. He is eminently readable. The stories he tells are compelling, and you find yourself drawn through the book in the way a good mystery novel works. The worst thing I could say about The Tipping Point is that it does not seem as rigorous as Blink. While the ideas of mavens, connectors, and salesmen are interesting, it's not clear that there aren't other important players in the social network that he hasn't talked about, or even that all of these players are important all the time. One of the examples he uses is of a maven whose area of expertise is social epidemics, creating a recursion that while interesting, makes the thread a little harder to follow. Plus, the ideas are somewhat less satisfying because they are less prescriptive. They provide only a model in which to think about things, but no specific ideas of what will and will not work in any given circumstance.Should you read this book? It depends. If you want to be pointed in a new direction for how to think about getting ideas and behaviours to spread through society, then yes. If you're looking for more concrete solutions (to anything other than teenage smoking), or if societal epidemics are not your area of interest, then don't bother. There is a maven in your network somewhere who knows what this book says when you need to find out. Your connector will tell you who they are and put you in touch. In this case, I'm probably the salesman.It seems to me that a good place to go from this book would be to the book my mother-in-law just purchased to help her business communication skills, entitled Made to Stick. I'm also going to think more about what the ideas in The Tipping Point mean for politics in my view of the world, and if I come up with anything, I'll let you know.As an aside, I've asked Calgary Grit to look into the Black Swan book that I reviewed a while ago to see if his impressions of it match my own. CG's secretly something of a numbers guy, so I'm hoping he'll have a better idea how well the ideas in that book translate from the world of finance - in which they originate - to the world of politics. He wrote me recently to say that he's got a copy and he'll let me know. If he posts on it, I'll point you that way. Otherwise, I'll let you know what he says.