On The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell

The way communications, both the words and the meanings of the words, get transmitted through the blogosphere demonstrates an interesting opportunity to apply and critique some of Gladwell’s hypotheses about social movements.  Let’s check some perspectives out:

Blog postings as “infection vectors.”  Since he chooses to use an analogy of epidemics so liberally, we might as well start there: blogs, if seen as discrete bodies, share quite a lot of bodily fluids.  It’s common enough, at this point, to see entire postings that are nothing but the citation of another blog, article or source.  And, with things like trackbacks, hit and traffic analysis, and comments, the paths that posts and stories use to inseminate, er, insinuate, rather, their way through the population is all the more obvious.  Blogs often even have a roll call of their most frequent partners.  It certainly suggests that Connectors might use their promiscuous exchanges to propagate a full-bore memetic infection.

The idea of Mavens as important to the transmission of ideas is apparent: even if small time blogger picks up an interesting story (who shared the Kilkenny letter first?), the “a-list” blogs will catch the bug real fast and spread the little guy around in a big way.

But all this is fairly rote.  The idea that internet politics are somehow different because they are a “one to many” communication medium, because they reduce the cost of entry for an individual to participate in the forum, because they provide fairly easy modes of information retrieval, etc., is old news.  Allow me to take a skeptic’s approach for just one moment.

This is politics we’re talking about.  Dirty, slime wielding, partisan hackery that, despite anybody’s best efforts, will spread like the plague.  The blogs can stir up a ruckus, yes, but in what way do these ruckii actually reflect meaningful information exchange?  How do we measure it?  If McCain addresses a blog comment in a national address, have we hit the big time, woah, hold-onto-your-hats tipping point?  If O’Reilly lashes out at the Huffington Post, thereby propagating the infection further, are we past the brink and in free-fall?

I’d suggest that much of the bloviation coming from the blogs is meaningful in that it can create the buzz that Gladwell prizes so highly, and the organs of propagation — a-list blogs, mainstream media articles, and so on — offer an intriguing path for exploration.  Yet, what I’d really like to follow, however, is a mixture of Levitt-Gladwell-Miller to round out the internet part of internet politics.  What actually makes a story happen, and how does it get used, and why do people willfully share it?  It’d never happen, especially since Spooky is way to spacey to get too involved, but one can always dream.

~ by Gabriel on September 10, 2008.