Oh Malcolm Gladwell.....

Gladwell has done it to me again. He has made my head spin and go a little crazy with a similar barrage of facts, experiments, and scenarios that I read in Blink a few years ago. This time however, as much as I found myself surprised, excited, and a little dumbfounded by what he was saying, I was really trying to put The Tipping Point within the context of this class, and it helped stifle some of the head spin. That, along with the readings we have done so far I think sufficiently prepared me for Gladwell’s statements and writing style. Gladwell is really good at what he does. He presents us with real stories, dissects them, and comes up with a conclusion and theory as to why events unfolded as they did, all in a very clever and new way. He is able to take everyday events and occurrences, like yawning, and apply some grand theory that actually works. If you were wondering, I did yawn right when he said I would, and I noticed people around me yawning as well. Hence, the head spin. Regardless, I found Gladwell’s The Tipping Point to be a great instruction manual on how to create social movements, how to create real change, and he presents ideas that actually do work and that we can hopefully use in our upcoming social change projects.

Last year, I took a course titled: Law & Order: The Politics of Crime and Punishment, with my favorite professor, Brian Pinaire (I mentioned him during our first day). We studied the “Broken Windows” theory that Gladwell mentions in The Tipping Point, at the very beginning of the semester, and its impact on crime reduction in New York City. We used the theory throughout the class to evaluate stories of crime and what could really have been done to prevent certain events from unfolding. Since then, I’ve been using the broken windows theory quite a bit in my own life. There’s that stereotype that girls are cleaner than boys, but it definitely does not ring true in my off-campus house I have here at Lehigh that I share with 4 of my friends. I won’t mention any names, but a certain someone likes to leave empty or heavily used containers or jars of food in the refrigerator. Let me just say that opening a jar of pickles for your sandwich and finding nothing but the juice is one of the worst feelings, ever. It kept happening too. Not just with pickles, but also with Orange juice, a box of Triscuits, and the Tostitos. One day, I had an Oreo craving and when I reached into the container for one, they were gone. ALL OF THEM GONE.  Why keep the package there when it was empty? Why? I got angry but I never really said anything because I did not want to point fingers.

This happened for a semester, and finally, I decided to take preventative broken windows-esque steps to eliminate this problem. Rather than throw away the containers right away, I left them out on the kitchen table for everyone to see. No one cleared it away, and what began to happen was a big pile of garbage began to mount, just after a few days. Eventually, someone cleared the pile away, and since then, the pickle incident, as I like to call it, has not happened since. I took a small step, as Gladwell points out as being an important step in social change.

Gladwell’s main premise in The Tipping Point is that change happens, trends happen, behaviors change, and products catch on like viruses do in a group of people. He identifies three distinctive patterns that account for why certain items of clothing become stylish, why crime rates in dangerous cities like New York suddenly drop, and explains how it just takes one moment, one tipping point to really fuel a great change.

1.     The contagious behavior starts within small groups.

2.     Little changes have big effects.

3.     Change doesn’t happen gradually, all it takes is 1 dramatic movement.

Comparing trends to that nasty virus I got last semester? Genius. Once again, Gladwell got me.  This helped explain a lot to me frankly. Uggs? To my own disdain, I’m wearing them right now and Gladwell’s theory really honed in on this one. In fact, you could apply Gladwell’s tipping point to almost all trends, and it rings true. It’s all in the title after all. We have been wrestling with the idea of “little things making a big difference” when discussing the true impact of “Save Darfur” orother humanitarian campaigns via Facebook and other social media tools. Gladwell said that these online movements truly weren’t making a difference, and in his typical style, dissected a Facebook page enough to prove his point. Now, I’m just dumbfounded again, because it’s interesting to note that in his own book, Gladwell says little things make big differences, so doesn’t he seem to contradict his recent statements about the impact of social movements via social media?

Anyhow, it will be exciting to see how our social change projects play out. I mean, we have all the elements that Gladwell points out as being essential to creating these big changes, so can we do it? Will we do it? Maybe it isn’t Gladwell’s intention for Tipping Point to be an instruction manual for J325, but I am glad we have all read it. Maybe we did not get it yet from the readings we have done previously in class, but it seems that social change is happening now at a faster rate because of these new media tools. Nowadays it’s all about the new and innovative ways we can reach people and spread a message, idea, product, or behavior. We can no longer depend on previously established business practices, we need to incorporate all people into the messages we broadcast and spread, and more and more people are now getting involved. Tipping Point gives us a good way to now take those ideas and really make a road map for how we want our projects, or bigger more “important” movements to play out. We know from this reading that bigger isn’t necessarily better, it’s about quality not quantity and that once we have a hook, we have a real chance of causing an epidemic-for the better.

Shirky Discusses Organization without Organizations in Here Comes Everybody

 

I’ll admit that I’m not perfect and that often times I take for granted all the good things I have in life. As I write this paper in the library I am finding it annoying that the kid next to me is eating a really smelly salad and taking forever to finish it. I complained about the snow a bunch of times, oh and the ice. That stuff sucks! I think everyone can safely say that they have at some point or another (or maybe within the last hour) complained about something trivial and unimportant. 

I mean really though, are any of those complaints that I mentioned above that troublesome? At Lehigh, surrounded by intelligent peers and professors, I often forget how lucky I have it. Being at a top university, at any college no less, is a privilege in itself. My classmates and I are in an elevated place where we have opportunities to discuss issues of importance and have them be heard. Unfortunately for most Americans, they do not ever get this chance. Besides the fact that only a small percentage of Americans attend college, there are still large disparities that exist between economic groups. Educational opportunities are lacking for poor students, and the mere scarcity of resources at any given time makes it difficult to get by. 

People who don’t have money to blow have plenty to complain about that make my struggles seem absolutely ridiculous. Here I am, upset that I have to walk up to Coppee Hall after a snowstorm, and yet there are people who struggle to get food on their tables every night. They deal with overcrowded public schools, an often times corrupt or ineffective police force, lack of healthcare coverage, and not finding a job. 

Previously, only people in power or the rich could garner enough attention and support to make social changes. Today however, it seems that more and more people from all walks of life can get a message out to the public. Thanks to these new social media tools we have been discussing in class, more and more people are getting thrown into and involved in this conversation and are getting the opportunity to get their voices heard about something they care about. 

If reading The Cluetrain Manifesto and We the Media didn’t get it through our heads, Here Come’s Everybody by Clay Shirky hammers in the idea that changes in media are causing great shifts in society. New technologies and media tools are altering corporate business structures, the original and gate-keeping news networks, and now, as Shirky point out, the ways in which we gather together for great changes in society. The very ways in which we communicate to each other about simple everyday occurrences to outright revolutionary goals mobilizing action have changed and become more open and inclusive. 

Shirky delves deep into the inner workings of group action and the way that individuals in a group define society, not individuals themselves. His ideas of group action apply to organizations, schools, and businesses. He explains how new social tools are breaking down the hierarchical structure that was once necessary for these institutions to function. We learned in Cluetrain how businesses have had to alter their structure, and in We the Media we learned how journalism and the news is changing and losing its gate-keeping abilities. Shirky lets us in on how we change the way we work together because of these new tools, and how those changes can make a huge difference.

So what comes next? We have seen that in Egypt, the president has had to not only publicly respond to the protests and violence, but that he has agreed to not run for again for presidency, and has had to appoint a new vice president and other officials to manage the unrest throughout the country. That seems like a pretty big deal to me. A few years ago we saw Barack Obama use social media to his advantage and win. We see more and more citizen journalism trumping professional work, and these citizen journalists are rich, they are poor, they are your next-door neighbors. 

New tools allow large groups to collaborate, by taking advantage of nonfinancial motivations and by allowing for differing levels of contribution. This means that everyone can now participate. I can talk about something. You can say something. Those who previously were silenced due to financial constraints can say something. My complaints can finally be ignored when more important things are out in the open. Social change can now begin with all types of people. The previous books we read focused on business or journalism, but Here Comes Everybody really zeros in on the people. It zeros in on us, and what we are capable of doing with enough motivation and enough of the right tools to spur changes. 

The majority of us in class last week disagreed with Malcolm Gladwell’s dismissal of new media tools like Twitter. What many skeptics, like Gladwell, fail to let go of, is a seemingly unhealthy distrust of group action and low expectations of people in general. Maybe it’s my optimism that seems to be flooding my mind here, but I would like to think that at the core, humans are good and moral. I think social change, great social change at that, can happen. Thanks to these new tools like Flickr, Twitter, and Facebook, as Shirky points out, we can raise money for charities, make people more aware of problems around the globe, and get people talking! It’s all happening at a faster rate too, and everywhere we turn are groups forming together to raise awareness and make a change. To disregard these fundamental ideas that Shirky raises in Here Comes Everybody is to not be aware of oneself and the capabilities to change things for the better.