JasonKoivu

Holy suppositions, Gladwell! There's a whole lotta coulds, may haves, apparentlies, perhapses up in here!

Malcolm Gladwell's basic premise in The Tipping Point: To explain how word-of-mouth is spread.

A couple of the examples he used were how crime was reduced in NYC under Giuliani's reign and how an old, dead-in-the-water brand of shoes seemingly suddenly were selling like hotcakes. But honestly, my favorite bit was the section on Sesame Street.

It's interesting stuff, no doubt with some truth to it, hell maybe even all of it, but it seemed like every hypothesis put forth was followed by misrepresentation of studies. Scientists were quoted as saying that possibly their study pointed towards such-and-such a conclusion, and then Gladwell took it and ran with it. That's not the case through out the book, but even if it only happens once, it casts doubt on the whole freaking thing.

There were times I hated this and times I actually enjoyed it. In fact, I enjoyed it more than I thought I would, more than I wanted to. For you see, this is the sort of thing feasted upon by ladder-climbing, power-lunchers, who want to put Gladwell's theories into practice for the purposes of creating their own wildfire word-of-mouth epidemic in the exalted name of the great and almighty greenback. That sort of greed, rising above the heads of most of humanity to serve the bloodsucking desires of one, is repellent.

I guess I'm one of the few who didn't read this about 10 years or more back. I resisted for a while, but succumbed to peer pressure and misrepresentation of the book's content. Regardless, here I am. I've read it and probably you have too. So I ask you, is this shit or is it genius? After all, this stupid little book managed to put its theories into practice and the damn thing blew up like nobody's business.