Hivemind plea:

I need a word. It may not exist. The concepts: Bloggers have the word ’blogsphere’ (sometimes ‘blogosphere’) which is the universe of all bloggers. Vonnegut came up with the term ‘karass’ referring to a group of people who (possibly unknowingly) work to some common end, an accidental/fated aggregation.

Thinking in terms – say – of all the forums/blogs/fanpages about Joss productions as a [insert word here]. I come up with remarkably lame words: ‘network’ (needs further dissertation); ‘meme-group’ (stinks up the entire room) ; meme-umbra (May the PTB forever preserve me from such utterances. Amen).

Help?

Fandom?

Or is that too general? Um...Jossversers?

Yeah, 'fandom' is too tight to the unifying concept. Say the ... thing ... was about politics. Ditto, 'Jossverse'. Thanks for the quick response, though.

Yeah, I'm trying to come up with something else...I got nothing.

Interweb? Cyber-something?

Thanks, Dana. There are people who can chart a picture of one (one approach :: another approach). One of them actually uses the word 'karass', but then goes on for a month explaining what it means.

Yeesh. I hate to have to stuff in a naive character or expository lump, to get this idea across. It is a real thing, in the real world. It oughta have a name.

Community? Hivemind (assumes too much uniformity of opinion, sorry)? pulling out the old Roget's, which has niftier words Convergence?

Thanks, Connie, Elena, Dana. It turned out -- when I finally got my head on straight -- that the reader probably didn't need to have all kinds of weird social notions added to things, to understand what was going on among some characters. The author was trying to jam a pet theory down the reader's throat. Bastard.

But the key thing about a karass is that the people in one *don't* have anything major in common -- they just unwittingly serve the same goal. Granfaloon, which is a percieved karass based on commonalities, is probably closer, but it's a bit of an insult.

(signed, read Cat's Cradle about 15 times.)

Yup. If I remember this right - and there's a good possibility I don't, since I haven't reread Cat's Cradle in twenty years and need to, because I loved it - Granfaloon is sort of the updated version of Cloudcuckooland, in terms of insult value.