New York Diary

like a puerto rican rocket, perhaps?

Every Thursday afternoon there's free music in the marble-and-pavement, fountain-and-9/11 memorial park on 45th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues. Usually, this means that a bunch of corporate types are serenaded as they take a hurried lunch before running off to go do something corporate again. Sometimes, however, the music is good enough that people really listen and enjoy it.

Sometimes, it's good enough that we dance.

And this, my friends, is how I spent my lunch break today. There was a three-man band, featuring a drummer, a keyboardist, and a trombonist/trumpeter/flutist (floutist?), playing fantastic Puerto Rican music, bantering with the audience, inserting lyrics about the various people eating lunch. And at some point while I was there, a random fellow started to dance. And then a girl with him. And then somebody else, this one in shirt and tie. And pretty soon, there were a bunch of us, some of us in pairs salsa dancing to what was obviously not quite a salsa beat (it was close, though), others on their own just doing their thing. It was great.

My friend MJS has this great obsession with fads. (Perhaps weirdly, he has now been published in Science and has had his research splashed all over the pages of the New York Times and the BBC. You can make anything academic if your research is good enough.) Years ago, back before he was academical hot stuff, MJS was trying to figure out pogs. You remember them? Everybody I knew collected the cardboard disks. We played at school. On school buses. At home. It was a dumb game: you throw one pog at a stack of other pogs (to which you've contributed your fair share), and you get to keep the ones you flip over. Then your opponent does the same. The point was to relieve your friend of all his pogs without losing very many, or any, of your own. It was gambling for eighth-graders, the most positive outcome of which was that one might win some cardboard circles.

What MJS said, and he was right, is that it's an awfully weird thing that this game would take off like a rocket. I mean, lots and lots of kids play hearts on the busride in to school, but those of us who don't do so don't feel particularly uncool and don't particularly wish that we did. Lots of adults play poker and make winnings, but people who don't play certainly don't feel left out. So what's the difference between hearts and poker, on the one hand, and pogs, on the other?

MJS posited that it had to do with numbers. Surely, he said, there had to be some critical mass of kids who played pogs before suddenly everybody felt they had to get in on the action. If enough people played hearts, the rest of us would want to, too, he thought. MJS likened the process to a state change in chemistry: just as one can add heat continuously to a solid and it just becomes a warmer solid until suddenly it hits that critical temperature at which--wham bam!--it becomes a liquid, one can add people to an activity and it just becomes a slightly more widespread activity until--wham bam again--it takes off like a rocket and becomes a fad that we all have to get in on.

I like the analogy. I like the question of why people are wired like that, if in fact we are. And I like the uncertainty about just what that critical number of people is. (Just think how much money you could make in marketing if you knew how many people in a given population you had to get on board before your product's popularity would snowball on its own!)

In the case of dancing in the marble-and-pavement park on 45th Street, though, I posit that we can know that critical number. It's three.

posted by Skay @ 7:04 PM