Is Cool Really Cool?

When reading Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Coolhunt”, I found a couple of very good points made. In the reading, it becomes clear that cool people are necessary to spot cool in general, and that trying to look for cool things is not realistic. This is stated in Gladwell’s first rule of cool, which states, “the act of discovering cool causes cool to take flight...” (Gladwell 12). If something is cool at one particular moment, then once people spot it as being cool, something else becomes cool instead, so it really is a fluid situation. This makes sense because part of cool is being rebellious and if something is noticed as cool, it may no longer really be rebellious. I also liked the idea that only cool people can really coolhunt, which makes sense because if you were not cool, why would you be able to see it? DeeDee and Piney in the article realized this when they had a non-cool coolhunter working for them and he “just didn’t have that certain instinct” (Gladwell 11). When you see a truly cool person, there is something about them that is different than other people, that screams at you like they know what they are doing and I think that is part of that instinct that DeeDee was talking about.

There is one part of Gladwell's article that I have a little trouble with though. I agree that it makes sense that only cool people can see cool. Yet, can you really see cool? The second you see cool, it is not really cool anymore. So then even cool people don't really see cool. And why would any cool person wear something that's not cool? Well of course they wouldn't, but if they define it as cool, then it would not be cool anymore so they couldn't wear it. By that logic they would be naked, but that might be thought of as cool too and here we go again! So maybe the point I'm trying to make here is that cool doesn't change once a cool person sees it. Only when an un-cool person like myself recognizes cool does it change. I didn't see that distinction in the article, but I feel it should be made.

I also thought there is a lot of overlap between many of the recent readings we’ve had such as Gladwell, Barabasi, and Watts. The idea that ideas or viruses or a number of other things spread through patterns that are all similar to one another is a common theme. I think the example in Gladwell’s article as well as Barabasi’s of the Iowa farmers and the hybrid corn is a prime example of how many things probably spread. You have those early innovators that set the stage for early adopters. Then if the idea is actually good enough to make all of them happy, you are undoubtedly going to get the majority. Of course, as with anything there will always be the stubborn stragglers at the end to resist change.

It becomes very interesting when thinking about these ideas with the spread of almost anything. As it’s March Madness, it makes me wonder just how the NCAA Tournament has become such a huge success. I speculate that it started out relatively small, but as those early adopters began to become excited about it, it lead to the majority slowly making it huge. Also, I think the ideas of hubs from Barabasi probably played a role as a fairly early adopter. Somewhere along the line someone figured out that the tournament could be a huge TV hit, and had the connections to make it reach so many more people, causing the huge spread. At the very least, the spread of ideas is an interesting thing to think about.