SurfingSports Standup Paddle Surf & Standup Paddling BLOG

The story of the "Hundredth Monkey Effect" is part New Age parable (Ken Keyes, Jr.)
and part pseudo-science...regardless, like the Bible, the story can be an inspirational parable when applied to human society...

More commonly the story is told by substituting bananas with sweet potatoes...it more or less goes like this...

Scientists were conducting a study of monkeys on the Japanese island of Koshima in 1952. These scientists observed that some of these monkeys learned to wash sweet potatoes before ingesting them, and gradually this new behavior spread through the younger generation of monkeys...in the usual fashion, monkey see...monkey do...observation and repetition...

Researchers observed that once a critical number of monkeys was reached...they hadn't actually counted the population...they arbitrarily chose 99...so that once the hundredth monkey was added to the population, this previously learned behavior of washing the sweet potatoes before eating them, instantly spread across the water to monkeys on other nearby islands and the mainland...it went viral...

Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book describing sociological "tipping points"...
He defined a tipping point in sociological terms: "the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point."...the book seeks to explain and describe "mysterious" sociological changes that we encounter in everyday life...

Gladwell stated that ideas, products, messages and behaviors spread like viruses do...by dissemination of information...

Websites...forums...blogs...etc...are all virus incubators...not many corners of the earth left that the internet hasn't infected with ideas, products, messages and behaviors transported from elsewhere...

It's been interesting to watch the sport of standup paddling take off in this way...

I remember way back in the early days of the modern reincarnation of standup...what, 4 or 5 years ago, there wasn't much out there on the www...people weren't even sure what to call it...

We thought that "standup paddle surfing" seemed appropriate, so we registered the domain www.standuppaddlesurfing.com in 2005...five years before that, when www.surfingsports.com came into existence, who was to know that "standup paddle surfing" would conveniently fit under this umbrella as a "new" surfing sport...

Since then, we've registered over a hundred domains...prolly cost us a few bunches of bananas...;-)

Here's just a fraction...

http://paddlesurfing.com
http://supsports.com
http://standuppaddlesurf.com
http://standuppaddlesports.com
http://beachboysurfing.com
http://standuppaddlesurfer.com
http://standuppaddlesurfing.com
http://standuppaddling.com
http://standupsurfing.com
http://supsurfing.com
http://supboarding.com
http://supboards.com
http://supboarder.com
http://supboard.com
http://standuppaddleboards.com
http://standuppaddleboarding.com

I'm not saying that we were the "hundredth monkey"...but, certainly through our blog, gallery postings, website, forum postings, and physical storefront...we were what Gladwell refers to as "Mavens"...or "information specialists"...Mavens start "word-of-mouth epidemics" due to their knowledge, social skills, and ability to communicate. As Gladwell states, "Mavens are really information brokers, sharing and trading what they know"...

I think that our many demos, clinics, word of mouth sales...emptying containers of SUP's...goes to that point...not to mention, my next point...imitation...the proverbial washing of the banana...

Since we opened the first dedicated brick & mortar SUP store on the North and South American continents, there have been several other "monkeys" follow suit...

Now we get word of a viral SUP store infection on the Australian continent...complete with horizontal board racks...;-)

The Gold Coast's Greenline SUP store...g'day mate...we wish them well...





One local reviewer stated: "it's so easy to compare the rocker , nose lift , tail lift and thickness on the boards as the are all stacked horizontally one above each other"...

Our clients have been saying that about our horizontal display of SUP's since 2007...;-)

Labels: Santa Barbara standup paddle sports, SUP store, The hundredth monkey effect