Page 49 - Complexity Perspective_Neat

of the population had a refrigerator the economics of delivering ice
collapsed.
● Since the publication of Malcolm Gladwell's book, hunting
tipping points has become a popular hobby in the press.
However, not all apparent tipping points are real, often the
turning points in an S-curve can be mistaken for a tipping point

when, in reality, they are an artifact of the curve itself.

● There are two kinds of tipping point.
A direct tip where the change occurs in the variable itself;
example, a respected investor sells his/her holdings in a
company triggering others to dump the stock.
The second is a contextual tip, where a change in some other
variable so changes the context that the variable of interest
shifts. Example, the Treasury Secretary comments that an
interest rate rise is likely; the next day there is a sell-off in the
bond market. The Secretary did not buy or sell bonds or even

make a recommendation but the context was changed.

Both direct and contextual tips may be deliberate, the result of a
manipulative action. Such manipulations may be legal in the
normal course of business, others may be illegal or immoral
designed to induce panic for profit.

● Initial tips: These are tips at the start of diffusion. When the
diffusion of Facebook through the population occurred, it
described the expected S-shape with the upswing in the adoption
curve occurring about 2007: an apparent tipping point. But,
further research could not discover any reason behind the
upswing other than the normal operating of diffusion, a
graphical phenomenon.

However, it could be argued that there was indeed a tipping
point for Facebook but that it occurred much earlier. The real
tipping point occurred when Zuckerburg put up the first
“thefacebook” page thereby changing the world of social media
interactions forever. A similar argument could be made for
Wikipedia or Google.

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