The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire. Just as a single sick person can start an epidemic of the flu, so too can a small but precisely targeted push cause a fashion trend, the popularity of a new product, or a drop in the crime rate.
If you're looking for fascinating and lively reading about social epidemics and how and why ideas spread, I recommend Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference.
Gladwell explains:
The second of the principles of epidemics--that little changes can somehow have big effects--is also a fairly radical notion. We are, as humans, heavily socialized to make a kind of rough approximation between cause and effect. . . . We are trained to think that what goes into any transaction or relationship or system must be directly related, in intensity and dimension, to what comes out. Consider, for example, the following puzzle. I give you a large piece of paper, and I ask you to fold it over once, and then take that folded paper and fold it over again, and then again, and again, until you have refolded the original paper 50 times. How tall do you think the final stack is going to be? In answer to that question, most people will fold the sheet in their mind's eye, and guess that the pile would be as thick as a phone book or, if they're really courageous, they'll say that it would be as tall as a refrigerator. But the real answer is that the height of the stack would approximate the distance to the sun. . . . Epidemics are another example of geometric progression: when a virus spreads through a population, it doubles and doubles again, until it has (figuratively) grown from a single sheet of paper all the way to the sun in fifty steps. As human beings we have a hard time with this kind of progression, because the end result--the effect--seems far out of proportion to the cause. To appreciate the power of epidemics, we have to abandon this expectation about proportionality. We need to prepare ourselves for the possibility that sometimes big changes follow from small events, and that sometimes these changes happen very quickly.
Gladwell goes on to explain the three main factors in epidemics, be they viral or social: the law of the few, the stickiness factor, and the power of context. In the section about context, a chapter is devoted to "The Magic Number One Hundred and Fifty." I found it fascinating because it seems to help explain what happens in online groups and discussion boards.
In my early days as an XJW online, I joined an email list. There were about 12 of us to start. Several who post here on JW.com were on this email list back in 1995. In the beginning, things were quite cozy. Even among just 12, there were diverse personalities, but we all knew each other well and made allowances for each other's oddities and extremes.
We invited other people to join us, and within a few months there were 60 of us. The discussion was lively and interesting, and the members were caring and tolerant.
Before any of us quite knew what had happened, the list exploded to nearly 200 members. Discussion was often dominated by scathing arguments and squabbles. Intimate details of romantic triangles and polygons were openly aired in National Enquirer and Peyton Place style. Many of the original members mourned the loss of our cozy coffee-shop character atmosphere and abandoned the list.
Simon's place, too, was quite cozy before the influx of H2O refugees in 2001. What happens? Perhaps the magic number one hundred fifty helps explain the phenomenon. Gladwell writes:
Humans socialize in the largest groups of all primates because we are the only animals with brains large enough to handle the complexities of that social arrangement. Dunbar has actually developed an equation, which works for most primates, in which he plugs in what he calls the neocortex ratio of a particular species--the size of the neocortex relative to the size of the brain--and the equation spits out the expected maximum group size of the animal. If you plug in the neocortex ratio for Homo sapiens, you get a group estimate of 147.8--or roughly 150. "The figure of 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who they are and how they relate to us. Putting it another way, it's the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar."
(I hope Englishman didn't skew their pub figures.)
Dunbar has combed through the anthropological literature and found that the number 150 pops up again and again. For example, he looks at 21 different hunter-gatherer societies for which we have solid historical evidence, from the Walbiri of Australia to the Tauade of New Guinea to the Ammassalik of Greenland to the Ona of Tierra del Fuego and found that the average number of people in their villages was 148.4. The same pattern holds true for military organization. "Over the years military planners have arrived at a rule of thumb which dictates that functional fighting units cannot be substantially larger than 200 men," Dunbar writes. "This, I suspect, is not simply a matter of how the generals in the rear exercise control and coordination, because companies have remained obdurately stuck at this size despite all the advances in communications technology since the first world war. Rather, it is as though the planners have discovered, by trial and error over the centuries, that it is hard to get more than this number of men sufficiently familiar with each other so that they can work together as a functional unit." It is still possible, of course, to run an army with larger groups. But at a bigger size you have to impose complicated hierarchies and rules and regulations and formal measures to try to command loyalty and cohesion. But below 150, Dunbar argues, it is possible to achieve these same goals informally: "At this size, orders can be implemented and unruly behavior controlled on the basis of personal loyalties and direct man-to-man contacts. With larger groups, this becomes impossible."
Granted, I don't feel that Simon is trying to command loyalty, but I did see similarities in the problems described. This makes me curious. How many active posters were there during the coffee shop phase? At what number did more formal measures become necessary to control unruly behavior? Does this also explain splinter groups from email lists and discussion boards?
Gladwell continues:
Then there is the example of the religious group known as the Hutterites, who for hundreds of years have lived in self-sufficient agricultural colonies in Europe and, since the early twentieth century, in North America. The Hutterites (who came out of the same tradition as the Amish and the Mennonites) have a strict policy that every time a colony approaches 150, they split it in two and start a new one. "Keeping things under 150 just seems to be the best and most efficient way to manage a group of people," Bill Gross, one of the leaders of a Hutterite colony outside Spokane told me. "When things get larger than that, people become strangers to one another." . . . At 150, the Hutterites believe, something happens--something indefinable but very real--that somehow changes the nature of community overnight. "In smaller groups people are a lot closer. They're knit together, which is very important if you want to be effective and successful at community life," Gross said. "If you get too large, you don't have enough work in common. You don't have enough things in common, and then you start to become strangers and that close-knit fellowship starts to get lost." Gross spoke from experience. He had been in Hutterite colonies that had come near to that magic number and seen firsthard how things had changed. "What happens when you get that big is that the group starts, just on its own, to form a sort of clan." He made a gesture with his hands, as if to demonstrate division. "You get two or three groups within the larger group. That is something you really try to prevent, and when it happens it is a good time to branch out."
I tried to remember the average size of the JW congregations with which I was involved. If memory serves, attendance usually ranged between 60 and 125.
If this is true, I suppose it means that if Simon wishes to keep his sanity, he should corral us into separate pubs of less than 150 each. Maybe on weekends he could allow us to go bar-hopping.
Ginny