Tipping Point Advertising and the Thesis

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Explaining the process of translation more specifically, Gladwell insists that "what Mavens and Connectors and Salesman do to an idea in order to make it contagious is to alter it in such a way that extraneous details are dropped and others are exaggerated so that the message itself comes to acquire a deeper meaning" (Gladwell 203). Reading between the lines here, what Gladwell is saying is that information is distorted -- not necessarily rendered unreliable, but certainly changed from its original untouched form -- into an exaggerated reflection of itself. This is scary not simply because it means that messages -- in advertising and elsewhere -- are consciously distorted to elicit specific reactions, but in addition because of what it suggests about the receivers of these messages.

Though necessary at times -- from auto mechanics, for instance -- the conscious use of this type of translation in advertising and other communications that are meant to persuade people to certain actions and behaviors amounts to a distortion not merely of information, but of truth. The number of "get rich from home" pop-up and email ads proliferating on the Internet are one very clear example of this. Little of what is said on these advertisements is an outright lie (though there certainly are some that lie more than others), but there is a deliberate distortion or translation that ignores certain details and exaggerates others. While it might be true that Margaret from Tacoma made $5,000 last month working just ten hours a week, the amount of hype (read: exaggeration) that this detail receives is huge. The fact that Marvin, also of Tacoma, paid $50 for a start-up kit and hasn't made a penny isn't revealed.

This is, of course, an extreme example, yet although one would assume that most adults know the old adage that if something seems too good to be true it probably is, these ads obviously convince enough people to send the $3.95 for the "home start-up kit" to make them worthwhile for the ad-makers.

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Translation isn't scary for what it is, its scary because it works. The human mind is trained to see the things it likes, apparently, and ignore the things it dislikes, and the type of translation Gladwell described in Tipping Point plays directly and explicitly on this fact. By exaggerating the elements that will already be exaggerated in the minds of eager consumers and downplaying the negative aspects of a given invention or innovation, the progenitors of new things do not actually allow for the free and fair exchange of ideas. The marketplace is not really concerned with ideas, that is, but rather with packaging. This fact has doubtless been known and used by advertisers and manufacturers for decades if not longer, but Gladwell's description of translation puts the process to work not only on products but on information itself.

When the very substance of our thought -- information and ideas -- is distorted to fit certain ideals, what does it say about the ways in which we are able to think? George Orwell famously argued that imprecise language was both a sign and a cause of imprecise thinking; it is more than plausible that distorted or "translated" language and thinking go equally hand in hand. The more we accept these translated messages as truth, the more we begin to think in translation, as it were. Let's hope that nothing too precious was lost in the original.

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