Blog-Pods

Because it is far too big to navigate without plan or habit; because we naturally make trodden trails like deer through the woods, visiting the licks where we know we'll find our kind of salt; because stars aren't uniformly distributed in space, but are drawn together by the gravitation of affinity; the vast blogosphere naturally separates into little eddies or circles or families of bloggers who read each other regularly, incubate memes, and share new links.

These circles are not strictly bounded; they overlap, sometimes they link up and enlarge, or pull in a new member. It's safe to say you have one. You belong intimately to one or more, and you guest at others more or less regularly. Your blog-reading probably alternates between regular visits to those familiar, trusty salt licks and random forays out into the unknown, from which you bring back news and trade-goods from distant isles to your . . . what?

What do you call your cluster of blogs? Tribe (as Rebecca Blood has), affinity group, coven, blogregation, clan? My blogsister Tamar's "best friend and life partner" Tom just began calling ours a "pod," like the family groups cetaceans travel in. It is an inspired and lovely metaphor, because of the sense of felt companionship we give each other as we move through the oceanic space of the blogosphere. We don't see each other, but our songs are immediately answered and riffed on; our pings are echolocated back from companion forms in the dark. It would be much too vast and lonely out there without those companions. Only a day or two after Tom coined the term, you'll find another pod-mate, Richard Cohen, casually referring to "several bloggers in my pod" as if we'd been saying this for years, as if that's just what it's called. So, I'm putting it a little further out there to see if it takes, to let some of you other pods try it on for size.

- amba

[Sorry 'bout the mixed metaphors . . . it was 2 A.M.]

UPDATE: The Glittering Eye would call his a koinon, from the Greek koinonia, "fellowship."

UPDATE II: Rebecca Blood e-mails:

I usually call them clusters, but that's a technical term, I guess. :)

because those groups really are personal. "cluster" describes a phenomenon. tribe or pod or ? describes an affinity.

Julie Leung e-mails:

I like the image of whale pods. We have them here off the coast, the orcas. I must confess that the
"pod" word though made me think of podcasting first.

Comments

[wavemaker]

Rather lovely, but does evoke a backwater image from Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (one of my fav SciFi movies).

[amba]

Yes, "Invasion" (the original and the remake) did give the word "pod" and the idea of "pod people" a creepy vibe. The question is whether the completely different meaning it has for cetacean fans is strong enough to override that.

[Tom]

Amba:

Lovely, and perfect, rumination on pods. In fact, pod people did cross my mind as it did for wavemaker. And ipods too. But cetacean pods, you are correct, won out among the intertexts for me. Thanks for the poetry.

[amba]

Ah, good. But then there's podcasting, which some say is the next wave, and I don't know enough about it to guess whether it will reinforce or contradict this image.

[wavemaker]

I have been thinking about this since my earlier post this morning --

what is the broader social conduct of whale pods? Do they interact with other pods of whales or sea creatures (other than gobbling up plankton)? If they stay unto themselves, the metaphor suffers somewhat, as I am sure most of us are eager to cast about in search of new links, and even to be members of several pods of distinct affinities.

[Richard Lawrence Cohen]

I recently read -- sorry, I forget where! -- that whales send low-frequency lovecalls to each other across thousands of miles, relaying them from one helpful whale go-between to the next so that, say, a male in the South Atlantic can signal to his intended in the North Atlantic although they belong to different pods and swim in different waters.

[amba]

I just realized, you could also call it a pride (though maybe that sounds too conceited).

Or a gaggle.