A critical review of the book -"The Tipping point"

1. The Tipping Point
There are very few pieces of literature that captivate and engage the general audience to reason about
the driving forces behind our social behaviour. This debut of the author has managed to garner
attention from a huge readership by involving the innate need to understand the incomprehensible.
The overwhelming widespread success of the work is clear sign of a fundamental quality and, as
argued by some, a pitfall of information, its interpretation and its sources.
There are several themes that run across the lengths of the book that try to argue and connect
individual actions to the phenomena at large. This review discusses the issues with the main themes
that are the anchors of the work:
Viral or non-viral, trends are a primary influence on numerous choices in our daily life. Ranging from
the spontaneously made choices to the ones that required prolonged rational decisions, trends have
impacted us by imparting undeniable, intangible value about what we make choices. The question of
how trends build traction in space and in time has attracted academic attention from both ends of the
spectrum – psychology on one side and social research on the other.
By provoking to probe the routine unquestioned patterns of human behaviour and their group
behaviour, arousing curiosity. The three laws ‘coined’ to glue the elemental human tendencies to the
global phenomena cause the effect of comprehension masterfully masking several assumptions and
interpretations that have been crossed. Laws are prescriptive and descriptive: the three demystifying
‘laws’ do not in any way extend and enable us to predict how trends happen or even how they may
be affected into existence. However, this gluing the small with the big has the effect of reinforcing
their arousal of curious interest.
Trends propagate as information. The fundamental premise of the work is that the information alone
is not sufficient for exacting an influence. The author presents a post-mortem of a phenomenon as a
model that contains information and its flow over several humans who act as sources for their
immediate neighbours in the path. The sources are classified into groups based on their impact in the
propagation which can only be determined posteriori. The model answers no questions or provides
no keys that enable engineering and causing such phenomenon scale
The enigma of unstructured issues about success, personality development and social -behaviour has
been a great attention grabber. Unlike his predecessors, Gladwell weaves stories of hope and promise
with the threads from accompanying research. The stories anchor the otherwise chaotic and confusing
deluge of empirical results by narrowing the themes relevant and close to the heart of his intended
readership at large.
The effects of compromising interpretations made by the author in composing the work are very
artistically hidden. The work derives its main meaning and value from the stories presented rather
than the chain of arguments, as remarked earlier. The stories connect to the need for hope, to the
need to see the ends justify the means in several aspects of human existence. By making a very careful
selection of various interpretations provided by several open-ended and far from conclusive academic
research in areas of social research, Gladwell has made a compel ling case using connectable stories to
gain public interest into the otherwise a fringe areas of social science. Thus, perhaps, it may be said
that intended ends justify the chosen means by influencing promise to better ourselves.