In the last few days I have gathered some time to read Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age from Duncan J. Watts, professor of sociology at the University of Columbia and The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference from Malcolm Gladwell, a New Yorker columnist and writer. In an earlier post, based on a article found a Fast Company, I have opposed the two, saying they were representing two different currents of thoughts in relation to the spread of ideas in the so-called web 2.0. I have to rectify myself: they are actually talking about very similar topics, albeit with varying degrees of optimism (and realism), different empirical foundations, and approaches.
Dr. Watts, the academic, the realist, is one of the leading figures of the science of networks, a relatively new discipline that draws its theoretical frameworks from physics, mathematics, biology, sociology and other sciences. His main object of study are small-world networks, a project that spans since his time in the Department of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics at Cornell University, done in collaboration with his adviser Prof. Steve H. Strogratz. Revisiting the “Small World Experiment“, the seminal work of social psychologist Dr. Stanley Milgram which gave legs to the myth of the “Six Degrees of Separation“, Strogratz and Watts developed, with the help of modern computing muscle, a mathematical model to study the phenomenon, in which any given person can be connected to anyone in the world through a small chain of just five connections.
In his book Watts gives a very thorough explanation of the small-world phenomenon and other types of network, making a very solid case for the science of networks and its possible applications. The reading is insightful and the requirement of mathematical knowledge in order to understand it, close to none. As a man of science, Watts keeps a very critical view at the phenomenon and does not fully believe that trends can start by design: “… a series of small random events — events that would go unnoticed under normal conditions — can, at the critical point, push the system into a universally organized state, giving the appearance of having been directed there strategically.” In another passage, he maintains that “… a successful cascade [information cascade, in the language of economics] has far less to with the actual characteristics of the innovation or even the innovator, than we tend to think”, describing that a seed alone is not enough, that trees spread their seeds hoping they will land in the right place.
Gladwell is a trained science journalist and has been able to amass an interesting body of ad-hoc knowledge for his work. He’s although a bit more optimistic than Watts when it comes to the phenomenon of social contagion, or word-of-mouth epidemics. His theory is manifested in three concepts: The Law of the Few, The Stickiness Factor and The Power of Context. The first deals with “gatekeepers”, people that are able to start a social epidemic. Gladwell names them Connectors, those with very high social capital; Mavens, people with extraordinary knowledge and with a social motivation to spread it; and Salesmen, individuals with a high capacity of persuasion. The second part of theory explains how certain ideas posses a higher capacity of maintaining themselves for longer in the collective psyche, by having a higher stickiness factor. Lastly, Gladwell considers how having the proper context, or to change an existing one, is also a necessary condition to start a social epidemic.
Watts deals with a larger topic, the science of networks, but one is able to find in his work some scientific rationale to support the ideas proposed by Gladwell. Gladwell sustains a top-down, pyramid-like network, what Duncan describes in his book a “scale-free network” (Barabási and Albert, 1999), governed by a “power law”. In these networks, highly connected individuals “can have an influence that is disproportionate to their number”, ergo the Connectors, who are highly connected nodes within the network. They both explain, with varying degrees of empirical evidence and examples, that there is a moment in which ideas, trends, innovations or diseases catch on and propagate exponentially within networks, this phenomenon is called by Gladwell, the tipping point, and critical point by Watts, who says “… these changes of state are not steady and gradual, but sudden. One second is raining, the next snowing.”
The two books are by no means whatever an exhaustive explication, but they have served as a good introduction to the topic. I regret however my reading order. I started with the more scientific oriented work of Watts and moved to Gladwell’s rather business-like journalist approach to the subject. I would reverse the order if I would have to read them again.
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