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.

I've heard too many horror stories of people writing fic under their own name, and then realizing their intended career as a kindergarten teacher might be imperiled by the easily-found GVSP they posted on the net.

swallows.

Um. Um. Okay, NOT panicking. Because - career as kindergarten teacher? Check. GVSP? Check. But my name is not FayJay. (....and now I feel like a Whitney Housten song.) Nor have I ever been able to find anything by googling my realworld name. Um. But, still...

ION, starting to watch Farscape more-or-less systematically, from the beginning which should mean that before too long I'll be happily venturing into the fanfic. Yay. (Read only one of Suela's stories so far, but v. much looking forward to expanding my horizons.)

I've been seduced by the idea of Farscape as well. I'm going to see some episodes.

Erg. Yeah, the Granfaloon was the highly structured, completely ineffective group. The karass was the completely unstructured, highly effective group. I was looking for something inbetween; lightly structured, pretty effective.

Numbskulled as the search was for a term, I still ran across all kinds of interesting concepts: smart-mob, ad-hocracy, emergent democracy, whuffie. Fun stuff to think about.

Edited because: Holy shit. In the time it took me to write this post there were three intevening posts. I am so not Buffista material!

I am so not Buffista material!

Pshaw! Look at your posts, babe! They scream Buffista material!