The Tipping Point

Moore's argument is that the attitude of the Early Adopters and the attitude of the Early Majority are fundamentally incompatible. I

Moore's book is entirely concerned with high technology. But there's no question that his arguments apply to other kind of social epidemics as well. In the case of Hush Puppies, the downtown Manhattan kids who rediscovered the brand were wearing the shoes because Hush Puppies were identified with a dated, kitschy, fifties image. They were wearing them precisely because no one else would wear them. What they were looking for in fashion was a revolutionary statement. They were willing to take risks in order to set themselves apart. But most of us in the Early and Late Majority don't want to make a revolutionary statement or take risks with fashion at all. How did Hush Puppies cross the chasm from one group to the next? Lambesis was given a shoe that had a very specific appeal to the southern California skateboarding subculture. Their task was to make it hip and attractive to teenagers all over the world — even teens who had never skateboarded in their life, who didn't think skateboarding was particularly cool, and who had no functional need for wide outsoles that could easily grip the board and padded uppers to cushion the shocks of doing aerial stunts. That's clearly not an easy task either. How did they do it? How is it that all the weird, idiosyncratic things that really cool kids do end up in the mainstream?

This is where, I think, Co

Perhaps the most sophisticated analysis of this process of translation comes from the study of rumors, which are — obviously — the most contagious of all social messages. In his book The Psychology of Rumor, the sociologist Gordon Allport writes of a rumor involving a Chinese teacher who was traveling through Maine on vacation in the summer of 1945, shortly before Japan's surrender to the Allies at the end of World War II. The teacher was carrying a guidebook, which said that a splendid view of the surrounding countryside could be seen from a certain local hilltop, and he stopped in a small town to ask directions. From that i

Psychologists have found that this process of distortion is nearly universal in the spread of rumors. Memory experiments have been done in which subjects are given a story to read or a picture to look at and then asked to return, at intervals of several months, and reproduce what they had been shown. Invariably, significant leveling occurs. All but a few details are dropped. But certain details are also, simultaneously, sharpened. In one classic example, subjects were given a drawing of a hexagon bisected by three lines with seven equal-size circles superimposed on top of it. What one typical subject remembered, several months later, was a square bisected by two lines with 38 small circles arrayed around the fringes of the diagram. "There was a marked tendency for any picture or story to gravitate in memory toward what was familiar to the subject in his own life, consonant with his own culture, and above all, to what had some special emotional significance for him," Allport writes. "In their effort after meaning, the subjects would condense or fill in so as to achieve a better 'Gestalt,' a better closure — a simpler, more significant configuration."

This is what is meant by translation. What Mavens and Co