The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can - By Gladwell, Malcolm Page 0,100

what you are really buying is access to the entire fax network — which is infinitely more valuable than the machine itself.

Kelly calls this the “fax effect” or the law of plentitude, and he considers it an extraordinarily radical notion. In the traditional economy, after all, value comes from scarcity. The conventional “icons of wealth” — diamonds, gold — are precious because they are rare. And when something scarce becomes plentiful — as oil did in the 1980s and 1990s — it loses value. But the logic of the network is exactly the opposite. Power and value now come from abundance. The more copies you make of your software, the more people you add to your network, the more powerful it becomes. This is why e-mail is supposed to be so powerful: it’s the ultimate tool for easily creating these kinds of personal networks.

But is this true? Epidemics create networks as well: a virus moves from one person to another, spreading through a community, and the more people a virus infects, the more “powerful” the epidemic is. But this is also why epidemics so often come to a crashing halt. Once you’ve had a particular strain of the flu, or the measles, you develop an immunity to it, and when too many people get immunity to a particular virus, the epidemic comes to an end. I think that when we talk about social epidemics, we give far too little attention to the problem of immunity.

In the late 1970s, for instance, businesses began to realize that the phone was a really cheap and efficient way of reaching potential customers, and since then the number of telemarketing calls to target households has increased tenfold. This sounds like a very good example of what Kelly is talking about — the extraordinary economic potential of a communications network that we all belong to — except that in certain key respects the explosion in phone use doesn’t sound like the law of plentitude at all. The fact that everyone has a phone makes the phone network very powerful, in theory. But the truth is that over the past twenty five years or so, the effectiveness of telemarketing has dropped by about 50 percent. Certain low ticket items — things that cost in the range of twenty five to thirty dollars, such as magazine subscriptions — are simply no longer economical to market over the phone. Belonging to a large network may be a wonderful thing, and the larger networks are, theoretically, the more powerful they are. As a network grows in size, however, it is also the case that the time and nuisance costs borne by each member of the network grow as well. That’s why people don’t talk to telemarketers anymore, and why most of us have answering machines and caller I.D. that lets us screen calls. The phone network is so large and unwieldy that we are increasingly only interested in using it selectively. We are getting immune to the telephone.

Is e-mail any different? I remember when I first got e-mail, back in the mid 1990s. I would rush home with great anticipation and dial in on my 4800 baud modem and I would have . . .

four messages from four very good friends. And what would I do? I would immediately compose long, elegant responses. Now, of course, I get up in the morning and go to my computer and I have sixty four messages, and the anticipation I once felt has been replaced by dread. I receive unwanted spam e-mail and forwarded stories and jokes that I have no interest in, and people I don’t particularly care about e-mail me to ask me to do things I don’t want to do. So how do I respond? I compose very, very short e-mails — seldom more than two lines long — and I often take two or three days to get back to people; and lots of e-mail I don’t answer at all. I suspect that the same thing is happening with other e-mail users around the world: the more e-mail we get, the shorter and more selective and more delayed our responses become. These are the symptoms of immunity.

What makes e-mail so susceptible to immunity is the very thing that initially made it seem so attractive to people like Kevin Kelly: how easy and inexpensive it was to reach people. In one recent study, for instance, psychologists found that groups who communicate electronically deal with dissenting opinions very differently than groups