I used to think that Clay Shirky was becoming the nearest thing the media/marketing industry got to a rock star until I saw this ad for Malcolm Gladwell’s London gig.
Gladwell is certainly a great writer, although I am not entirely convinced by the suggestion of one commentator that he is “the most influential thinker of the i-pod generation”. His skill seems to be to repackage existing academic theory and turn it into a compelling narrative. It makes for books that are easy to read, but not exactly ground breaking and let’s be honest, not that helpful … how many of us read Tipping Point and then said ‘now what’?
There again, if we end up selling 100th as many copies of Crowd Surfing as Gladwell has of Tipping Point and Blink, we will be very happy.