The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can - By Gladwell, Malcolm Page 0,97
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 was 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.