aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Friday, February 15, 2008

John Lewis & The Tipping Point

The Lewis switch has lots of people talking tipping points again.

“The willingness of a high-profile politician not simply to endorse one candidate but to switch from one to another (at least in terms of who he believes he’ll vote for as a super delegate) is a powerful sign that a tipping point is at hand,” says Josh Marshall.

“He gives permission - even encouragement - for other Clinton super-delegates to move to prevent a bruising and bitter fight through the spring. It’s a tipping point,” says Andrew Sullivan.

The term “tipping point” became fashionable with the publication of Malcolm Gladwell’s 2000 book which defines “tipping points” as the levels at which the momentum for change becomes unstoppable. Significantly, the book sought to explain how ideas, trends and products are moved to the tipping point.

Gladwell asserts that ideas spread like viruses and credits “Connectors”—people who “link us up with the world ... people with a special gift for bringing the world together”—for moving those viruses to the Tipping Point. The suggestion implicit in the statements of Marshall and Sullivan, then, is that Lewis is a Connector who will act as an agent to move us to the Obama Tipping Point.

Journalists reporting on endorsements typically point out that endorsements rarely translate into actual votes from voters. Bloggers are under no such obligation. And even Gladwell was not proposing a one-to-one direct correlation. Rather, he was describing a dynamic, a sociological occurrence.

But as it happens, in February’s Fast Company Magazine writer Clive Thompson asks, Is The Tipping Point Toast? He looks at the work of network theorist Duncan Watts, now working at Yahoo!, and finds that it shoots down Gladwell’s idea of influencers. Thompson says Gladwell’s book was built on shaky science from an old and imperfect study.

And Watts’ work might help explain why endorsements don’t always translate into votes:

[T]here are a lot of ways an Influential could convert the masses. Merely talking to a friend once could infect her with an idea. Or it might take several conversations. Or maybe Influentials are so persuasive they’re like trend vampires, and each victim they bite becomes hyperpersuasive too. Depending on how you define the specific mechanics of influence, you’d get totally different types of epidemics--or maybe none at all. But gurus of the Influentials theory never directly clarify these mechanics.

“All they’ll ever say,” Watts insists, is that a) there are people who are more influential than others, and b) they are disproportionately important in getting a trend going.

That may be oversimplifying it a bit, but last year, Watts decided to put the whole idea to the test by building another Sims-like computer simulation. ... The results were deeply counterintuitive. The experiment did produce several hundred societywide infections. But in the large majority of cases, the cascade began with an average Joe (although in cases where an Influential touched off the trend, it spread much further). To stack the deck in favor of Influentials, Watts changed the simulation, making them 10 times more connected. Now they could infect 40 times more people than the average citizen (and again, when they kicked off a cascade, it was substantially larger). But the rank-and-file citizen was still far more likely to start a contagion.

Why didn’t the Influentials wield more power? With 40 times the reach of a normal person, why couldn’t they kick-start a trend every time? Watts believes this is because a trend’s success depends not on the person who starts it, but on how susceptible the society is overall to the trend--not how persuasive the early adopter is, but whether everyone else is easily persuaded. And in fact, when Watts tweaked his model to increase everyone’s odds of being infected, the number of trends skyrocketed.

“If society is ready to embrace a trend, almost anyone can start one--and if it isn’t, then almost no one can,” Watts concludes. To succeed with a new product, it’s less a matter of finding the perfect hipster to infect and more a matter of gauging the public’s mood. Sure, there’ll always be a first mover in a trend. But since she generally stumbles into that role by chance, she is, in Watts’s terminology, an “accidental Influential.”

It sounds to me like society is ready to embrace the Obama trend. And Lewis is along for the ride.