BOOK REVIEW: Poli-fluentials: The New Political Kingmakers

You know, all good streaks have to end sometime. Over the past few weeks, I've had the opportunity to read some of the reports from George Washington University's Institute for Politics, Democracy, and the Internet, and I've been more impressed by each successive document. That is, until this week. This week, I found that IPDI can completely whiff once in a while. But, hey. 75%'s not bad, right?

It's not that this report doesn't contain interesting material and draw compelling conclusions. It does. The problems that I had with the document stem from two different oversights: a) though it claims to approach its classification process scientifically, the approach researchers use is flawed, and b) it's not telling our class anything that we didn't know thanks to Malcolm Gladwell.

The classification system that the report uses to categorize individuals as "poli-fluentials" is hampered by its limited criteria and small sample size. Setting aside the structural flaws, the report also does a fairly shoddy job of explaining exactly how to take advantage of such individuals, or even how to identify them in the first place. It's like they had a really interesting idea for a report, but then simply lost steam when it came time to flesh it out.

Problematic for our class is also the fact that this report is redundant. Much of the territory covered in this report was covered more engagingly by Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point. Slapping some specious political statistics on Gladwell basic ideas doesn't make for an enlightening reading experience. Rather, it leaves me scratching my head, wondering what all the fuss is about.