The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can - By Gladwell, Malcolm Page 0,99

it tends to be toxins and gases — and his fear makes him anxious. His anxiety makes him dizzy and nauseated. He begins to hyperventilate. He collapses. Other people hear the same allegation, see the “victim” faint, and they begin to get anxious themselves. They feel nauseated. They hyperventilate. They collapse, and before you know it everyone in the room is hyperventilating and collapsing. These symptoms, Wessely stresses, are perfectly genuine. It’s just that they are manifestations of a threat that is wholly imagined. “This kind of thing is extremely common,” he says, “and it’s almost normal. It doesn’t mean that you are mentally ill or crazy.” What happened in Belgium was a fairly typical example of a more standard form of contagious anxiety, possibly heightened by the recent Belgian scare over dioxin contaminated animal feed. The students’ alarm over the rotten egg odor of their Cokes, for example, is straight out of the hysteria textbooks. “The vast majority of these events are triggered by some abnormal but benign smell,” Wessely said. “Something strange, like a weird odor coming from the air conditioning.” The fact that the outbreaks occurred in schools is also typical of hysteria cases. “The classic ones always involve schoolchildren,” Wessely continued. “There is a famous British case involving hundreds of schoolgirls who collapsed during a 1980 Nottinghamshire jazz festival. They blamed it on a local farmer spraying pesticides.” There have been more than a hundred and fifteen documented hysteria cases in schools over the past three hundred years.”

Is it a mistake to take the hysterical outbreaks like the Belgian Coke scare too seriously? Not at all. It was, in part, a symptom of deeper underlying anxieties. What’s more, the children who felt sick were not faking their symptoms: they were sick. It’s just that it’s important to realize that sometimes epidemic behavior among children does not have an identifiable and rational cause: the kids get sick because other kids got sick. The post Columbine outbreak of school shootings is, in this sense, no different. It is happening because Columbine happened, and because ritualized, dramatic, self destructive behavior among teenagers — whether it involves suicide, smoking, taking a gun to school, or fainting after drinking a harmless can of Coke — has extraordinary contagious power.

My sense is that the way adolescent society has evolved in recent years has increased the potential for this kind of isolation. We have given teens more money, so they can construct their own social and material worlds more easily. We have given them more time to spend among themselves — and less time in the company of adults. We have given them e-mail and beepers and, most of all, cellular phones, so that they can fill in all the dead spots in their day — dead spots that might once have been filled with the voices of adults — with the voices of their peers. That is a world ruled by the logic of word of mouth, by the contagious messages that teens pass among themselves. Columbine is now the most prominent epidemic of isolation among teenagers. It will not be the last.

Beware the Rise of Immunity

One of the things I didn’t talk about much in The Tipping Point, but which I have been asked about over and over again, is the effect of the Internet — in particular, e-mail — on my ideas about word of mouth. Surely, after all, e-mail seems to make the role of the Connector obsolete, or at least changes it dramatically. E-mail makes it possible for almost anyone to keep up with lots and lots of people. In fact, e-mail does make it possible to cheaply and effectively reach people — or customers — whom you might not know at all.

Kevin Kelly, one of the gurus of the New Economy, has written, for example, of what he calls the “fax effect,” which is a version of this argument. The first fax machine ever made was the result of millions of dollars of research and development and cost about $2,000 at retail. But it was worth nothing because there was no other fax machine for it to communicate with. The second fax machine made the first fax more valuable, and the third fax made the first two more valuable, and so on. “Because fax machines are linked into a network, each additional fax machine that is shipped increases the value of all the fax machines operating before it,” Kelly writes. When you buy a fax machine, then,