Blink - and miss the point

You’re in a bookshop or library looking for a good read. You pick up a book and have minutes to make a judgement. In these circumstances Blink has a lot going for it.

Author Malcolm Gladwell, with his shock of frizzy hair, looks slightly “mad scientist”, certainly iconoclastic. He has good pedigree: The Tipping Point was a blockbuster based on a simple premise (that a small change can have dramatically vast consequences).

This book also offers an intriguing paradox: “The power of Thinking without Thinking!” Of course it’s all intriguing, so you must have it.

Unfortunately, you can’t judge a book by its cover, and this one has much less than meets the eye. I choose these particular clichés with care because Gladwell presents, over 250 pages of sometimes insouciant, sometimes infuriating prose, a thesis that many information professionals will find discouraging.

We live in a world where we are encouraged to consume information in bite sizes, often judging data out of context. Yet, here, Gladwell wants us to accept that we can make good judgements based on very little information – slices of it; what you can assess in a single blink.

He peppers his critique with many arresting stories, of the kind that veer towards suburban myths – the case of the Greek statue that didn’t look right, but fooled John P Getty Museum acquisitions experts.

Tellingly, he doesn’t dwell on instances where judgements based on preconceived notions and prejudices deliver bad decisions – look no further than the WMD dossiers assembled with threadbare intelligence that led the British Government to “blink” in favour of the Iraq war.

But Gladwell is a story teller, a populist one, and he is cutting his cloth to fit the times. We now live in a world where academics and librarians no longer control the production of, and access to, information. With the great mass of people now distrusting specialist “keepers of wisdom”, the world wants to be reassured that judgements can be made with artistry rather than specialist research skills and conclusions based on thorough and well-tested empirical evidence.

In this book, Gladwell is merely pandering to the “fast-food information generation”

IN BRIEF
Blink
By Malcolm Gladwell
Allen Lane
ISBN 0-713-99727-3
£16.99

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