Face-to-Face Communications Is Powerful, Postdigital Communications Tool

摘要

In Malcolm Gladwell's first book, The Tipping Point, he asked, and answered, a number of provocative questions about change, including why word-of-mouth communications continues to be so powerful. "What is now obvious to me," he wrote in the book's afterword, "is that we are about to enter the age of word of mouth, and that, paradoxically, all of the sophistication and wizardry and limitless access to information of the New Economy is going to lead us to rely more and more on very primitive forms of social contacts"—in other words, a rise in direct, person-to-person information sharing, unmediated by digital technologies.