Most words ending in sphere describe aspects of the natural world. The Latin word sphaera originally described a globe or ball, as did the Greek word spharia on which it was based, but these terms were also used to describe the “spheres” through which the moon, sun, planets, and stars appeared to move around the earth.
We no longer believe the universe revolves around the earth, but we still talk about the atmosphere and its subdivisions when describing the layered air surrounding the earth, from the troposphere touching the earth’s surface to the exosphere six hundred kilometers above it. Similarly, the “biosphere” describes the parts of the earth and its atmosphere within which life exists.
It’s natural enough, then, that the suffix sphere has over the last two decades become a standard form for those information systems that also girdle the earth, albeit metaphorically speaking.
First among these is the blogosphere—a word initially coined, like many fine digital terms, as a joke. The coiner was the writer and pioneering blogger Brad L. Graham, who on September 10, 1999, posted an entry on his blog, the BradLands, speculating about the booming future of the medium. “Is blog- (or -blog) poised to become the prefix/suffix of the next century?” he asked. “Will we soon suffer from (and tire of) blogorreah [sic]? Despite its whimsical provenance, it’s an awkward, homely little word. Goodbye, cyberspace! Hello, blogiverse! Blogosphere? Blogmos?”67
Coined partly in tribute to the older notion of a logosphere (from the Greek logos, “word,” and meaning the global realm of discourse or intellectual discussion), blogosphere rapidly migrated from being a tongue-in-cheek coinage to something neatly slotting into an empty linguistic space—a term fit to describe the interlocking global network of blogs, and the quasi-communal atmosphere of communications across them.
The term blog itself was young when blogosphere was coined. A compression of the phrase “web log,” it dates from the mid-1990s, although it was the launch in 1999 of the online service Blogger that first brought blogging as an activity to general web users as well as early-adopting experts. Similarly, relatively little time has elapsed between the public success of other new social media and communications services and the coining of new terms for their community of users.
The micro-blogging service Twitter, for example, was launched in 2006, and as it grew in popularity the coinage of twitterverse swiftly followed—a collective description of the world’s tweeting that has proved more popular than the alternative twittersphere, although both terms are used.
Within each realm, a host of user labels and subdivisions exist, some of which have become internationally recognized words in their own right. Twitter followers are often known as tweeps, while gatherings of twitter users can be called tweetups. Both blogaholics and tweetaholics are those who indulge rather too compulsively in their preferred online forms of self-expression—of which blogorrhea and twitterrhea respectively may be the symptoms, signifying far too much sharing of far too much information with a largely indifferent world.