The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

While the importance of the messenger—Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen—is vital to social epidemics, the actual content of the message is also important for achieving Tipping Points. Sesame Street and Blue’s Clues are two examples of sticky children’s television shows whose creators found “a simple way to package information” that made it “irresistible” (132).

The creators of Sesame Street discovered, “If you can hold the attention of children, you can educate them” (100). This contradicted received wisdom about the possibilities of education via TV. Crucially, children pay attention when the content makes sense, and they become distracted when the material is confusing. The stickiness of a program depends on how long a child’s eyes are actively and interestedly glued to the screen. Sesame Street’s legacy as an influential education children’s program is rooted in the realization that “if you paid careful attention to the structure of your material, you could dramatically enhance stickiness” (110). Substantial research about how young children digest television programs and when they become distracted informed these discoveries about sticky television, including psychologist Ed Palmer’s well-known Distractor technique that determined how often viewers actually paid attention to the screen by running a slideshow next to a television showing Sesame Street.