Tipping Point

The major idea underlying the concept in the term tipping point, as it relates to the study of social networks, is that no matter how novel or groundbreaking an idea, product, social movement, television show, and/or advertisement, they all must reach the “right” people in order to diffuse throughout society. Although Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point (2000), incorporates Aristotle's ideas of logos (the inherent logic embedded in a message) and pathos (the emotional appeal that a message might have on its intended audience) into his overarching thesis, it is ethos (the nature of the source) that provides explanation of why certain “epidemics” spread. The examples provided throughout the text are predicated on the previous scholarship of Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld as well as Everett Rogers. Katz and Lazarsfeld's model of communication argued that messages are not communicated directly between a source and a receiver. Rather, the communication process often involves a third party, to whom they refer as an “opinion leader,” who acts as a communicative conduit between two parties. Katz and Lazarsfeld called this the “two-step flow model.” In other words, communication occurs between source and receiver, although it includes a social conduit.

Rogers's diffusion model, which graphically depicts whether and how efficiently innovations spread throughout society, argues that certain members of society become more influential in “spreading the word” and having those in the general public subsequently adopt something new. For example, when a new technology is introduced to the mass public, the innovators adopt this novelty first, then become the opinion leaders (or social influencers) for others. Gladwell thus predicates his axioms on the contributions of these three communication scholars. Tom Valente's work also provides an important contribution to any discussion dealing with the link between diffusion and social networks, as he, too, argues that contagion (at least partially) is a function of social/network influence.

Throughout the course of The Tipping Point, Gladwell likens the spread of ideas, products, social movements, and the like to an epidemic, which can aptly be defined as a disease occurring suddenly, and perhaps without warning, which comes to affect a large number of individuals within a given population. As such, Gladwell speaks about such mass epidemics as the adoption of Hush Puppy shoes by American consumers, the interest in the children's television show Sesame Street by American families, the cleanup of the subway system in Manhattan, and the suicide attempts by teenagers in Micronesia—and how social beings, embedded in social networks, have the power to influence these and other epidemics.

Gladwell notes Sesame Street as an example of a show that is carefully engineered to “infect” preschool children with literacy.