Long-time reader and astute commenter, Xianhang (Hang) Zhang wrote a very interesting post a couple of weeks ago on his blog: The Evaporative Cooling Effect. It is part of a fascinating series he is doing on social software. The post explores a phenomenon that is very close to the status illegibility phenomenon I explored two weeks ago, and in fact draws inspiration from the same Groucho Marx/Lake Wobegon observations that I started with.
Evaporative cooling is basically the effect of the highest status people in a group leaving, lowering the average status of those left behind.
What I found fascinating though, was Hang’s suggestion for how to combat the effect (and thereby stabilize groups). In my post, I proposed that status illegibility helps create the stability. Hang brings in another dimension, which is illegibility in the group’s environment/context.
In particular, in social software (or physical environments for that matter), smarter-than-average early adopters often leave when the “unwashed masses” start to jump on the bandwagon, devaluing the social cachet. Hang proposes that one of the best ways to combat this is to build (or rather catalyze the evolution of) “warren” architectures instead of “plaza” architectures. Here are the pictures that pair of evocative terms produces in my head. You might imagine something else:
