OK, here comes my excessive review and many quotes. I don't know what I get out of noting all of this stuff, but I feel the need to note it. Perhaps it's some form of reader's OCD. Goodreads, please don't ever go away. 
 This is probably one of the most fascinating books I've ever read, but I found myself thinking the whole time, "yes, but what has social networking done for the tipping point [the point at which an idea "tips," like an epidemic, into spreading en masse]?" Gladwell almost touches on this in his (2003?) Afterword about email and telephone communication, but I still think FB and Web 2.0 are whole new beasts to which he should turn his critical eye when discussing the spread of ideas. 
 Favorite quotes: 
 There are plenty of advertising executives who think that precisely because of the sheer ubiquity of marketing efforts these days, word-of-mouth appeals have become the only kind of persuasion that most of us respond to anymore. (p. 32) 
 We don't seek out friends, in other words. We associate with the people who occupy the same small, physical spaces that we do. (p. 36) 
 Acquaintances, in short, represent a source of social power, and the more acquaintances you have the more powerful you are. Connectors -- who are masters of the weak tie -- are extraordinarily powerful. (p. 54) 
 Kids don't watch when they are stimulated and look away when they are bored. They watch when they understand and look away when they are confused. If you are in the business of educational television, this is a critical difference. (p. 102) 
 Daniel Anderson says that new research suggests that children actually don't like commercials as much as we thought they did because commercials "don't tell stories, and stories have a particular salience and importance to young people." (p. 118) 
 Kids reach a saturation point. But then nostalgia sets in. (p. 124) 
 An adult considers constant repetition boring, becuase it requires reliving the same experience over and over again. But to preschoolers repetition isn't boring, because each time they watch something they are experiencing it in a completely different way. At CTW, the idea of learning through repetition was called the James Earl Jones effect. (p. 125) 
 Minor, seemingly insignificant quality-of-life crimes, they said, were Tipping Points for violent crimes. Broken Windows theory and the Power of Context are one and the same. They are both based on the premise that an epidemic can be reversed, can be tipped, by tinkering with the smallest details of the immediate environment. (p. 146) 
 Character, then, isn't what we think it is or, rather, what we want it to be. It isn't a stable, easily identifiable set of closely related traits, and it only seems that way because of a glitch in the way our brains are organized. Character is more like a loose bundle of habits and tendencies and interests, loosely bound together and dependent, at certain times, on circumstance and context. The reason that most of us seem to have a consistent character is that most of us are really good at controlling our environment. (p. 163) 
 What this study is suggesting, in other words, is that the convictions of your heart and the actual contents of your thoughts are less important, in the end, in guiding your actions than the immediate context of your behavior. (p. 165) 
 Wesley realized that if you wanted to bring about a fundamental change in people's belief and behavior, a change that would persist and serve as an example to others, you needed to create a community around them, where those new beliefs could be practiced and expressed and nurtured. (p. 173) 
 "Man evolved to feel strongly about few people, short distances, and relatively brief intervals of time; and these are still the dimensions of life that are important to him." -- evolutionary biologist S. L. Washburn (p. 177) 
 The Rule of 150 says that congregants of a rapidly expanding church, or the members of a social club, or anyone in a group activity banking on the epidemic spread of shared ideals needs to be particularly cognizant of the perils of bigness. Crossing the 150 line is a small change that can make a big difference. (p. 183) 
 The kind of bond that Dunbar describes in small groups is essentially a kind of peer pressure: it's knowing people well enough that what they think of you matters. (p. 186) 
 "Divorced people who suffer depression and complain of cognitive dysfunction may be expressing the loss of their external memory systems," Wegner writes. "They once were able to discuss their experiences to reach a shared understanding...They once could count on access to a wide range of storage in their partner, and this, too, is gone...The loss of transactive memory feels like losing a part of one's own mind." (p. 189) 
 "You see more activists in trendsetters. People with more passion." (p. 208) 
 "It's a kind of imitation. I'm getting permission to act from someone else who is engaging in a deviant act. Is that a conscious decision? I can't tell." (p. 223) 
 And how much easier is it to hang the hooks of knowledge on a story? (p. 255) 
 The people haven't changed, but the way in which the task appears to them has. (p. 264) 
 But to have kids growing up in disaffection and loneliness is hardly a new development. Millions of kids who grow up just as emotionally impoverished as Andy Williams don't walk into their school one morning and start shooting. The difference is Columbine. (p. 268) 
 My sense is that the way adolescent society has evolved in recent years has increased the potential for this kind of isolation. We have given teens more money, so they can construct their own social and material worlds more easily. We have given them more time to spend among themselves -- and less time in the company of adults. We have given them e-mail and beepers and, most of all, cellular phones, so that they can fill all the dead spots in their day -- dead spots that might once have been filled with the voices of adults -- with the voices of their peers. That is a world ruled by the logic of word of mouth, by the contagious messages that teens pass among themselves. Columbine is now the most prominent epidemic of isolation among teenagers. It will not be the last. (p. 271) 
 Belonging to a large network may be a wonderful thing, and the larger networks are, theoretically, the more powerful they are. As a network grows in size, however, it is also the case that the time and nuisance costs borne by each member of the network grow as well. That's why people don't talk to telemarketers anymore, and why most of us have answering machines and caller I.D. that lets us screen calls. The phone network is so large and unwieldy that we are increasingly only interested in using it selectively. We are getting immune to the telephone. (p. 273)