12 Years Ago Tomorrow: Smiling is over-rated in America

By Moristotle

[Originally published on January 30, 2009.]

I told my friend Ken, who took this photograph a couple of days ago and labeled it “Visionary,”¹ that I tended not to feel comfortable with photographs of myself in which I was not smiling. He commented that smiling is much over-rated in America. If you look at photographs from just a few generations ago, you’ll see no one smiling.

Reno Costco almost sold out barely midway through

Jim Rix's book signing at the Reno Costco is being very successful. With a couple of hours of signing left today and all of tomorrow at the store, its stock of his true crime book, Jingle Jangle: The Perfect Crime Turned Inside Out, is two-thirds gone. Jim (and I) are hoping for Malcolm Gladwell's tipping point¹ to be reached soon....
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1. Tipping points are "the levels at which the momentum for change becomes unstoppable." Gladwell defines a tipping point as a sociological term: "the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point." The book seeks to explain and describe the "mysterious" sociological changes that mark everyday life. As Gladwell states, "Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread like viruses do." The examples of such changes in his book include the rise in popularity and sales of Hush Puppies shoes in the mid-1990s and the precipitous drop in the New York City crime rate after 1990. [Wikipedia]

Dawkins on tipping points

Having recently read Malcolm Gladwell's book, The Tipping Point, as well as currently discussing with my friend Jim Rix ways to nudge sales of his book Jingle Jangle: The Perfect Crime Turned Inside Out to a tipping point (and even having watched an episode of the TV program "Mad Men" last night—about Madison Avenue advertising in the 'sixties), I was fascinated this morning to come across the following passage in Richard Dawkins's book, The Blind Watchmaker (about how Darwinian evolution can produce complex organisms like the human brain):

It appears to be a fact that many people will buy a record for no better reason than that a large number of other people are buying the same record, or are likely to do so....
    To a lesser extent, the same phenomenon of popularity being popular for its own sake is well known in the worlds of book publishing, women's fashions, and advertising generally. One of the best things an advertiser can say about a product is that it is the best-selling product of its kind. Best-seller lists are published weekly, and it is undoubtedly true that as soon as a book sells enough copies to appear in one of these lists, its sales increase even more, simply by virtue of that fact. Publishers speak of a book "taking off," and those publishers with some knowledge of science even speak of a "critical mass for take-off." The analogy here is to an atomic bomb...When a book's sales "go critical," the numbers reach the point where word-of-mouth recommendations et cetera cause its sales suddenly to take off in a runaway fashion. Rates of sales suddenly become dramatically larger than they were before critical mass was reached, and there may be a period of exponential growth before the inevitable levelling out and subsequent decline. [from Chapter 8, "Explosions and Spirals," pp. 219-220]

Smiling is over-rated in America

I told my friend Ken, who took this photograph a couple of days ago and labeled it "Visionary,"¹ that I tended not to feel comfortable with photographs of myself in which I was not smiling. He commented that smiling is much over-rated in America. If you look at photographs from just a few generations ago, you'll see no one smiling. I wonder whether anyone has studied this. I think that a history of the smile in America could be fascinating. How did the smile come to be over-rated? When was the tipping point? Et cetera.