The WordPress Community: Like A School Of Fish

My brother, a PhD marine biologist, would tell me that any gathering of fish that stay together for social reasons are said to be shoaling.  If they are also swimming together in a coordinated way in the same direction, then they are schooling.  Hence the phrase “a school of fish”.  One of the benefits that fish get out of being together is successful foraging, which is searching for food or other resources.

The WordPress community, or any other online community for that matter, is much like a school of fish.  If narrowed down to one word, I think passion is the best one to describe the direction we are all heading in.  It doesn’t matter if it’s sharing our poetry, movie reviews, or pictures of a sock collection, we are all here because we love it and want to share it with someone who might just like it a little too.  Thanks to the ease, options, and supports that WordPress provides for its members, we are able to stay within a coordinated manner while at the same time maintaining our individuality and personality.

The foraging we are doing is plentiful.  Connections with other like-minded individuals, an outlet for our musings, inspiration.  Humans are by nature ‘hungry’ for those kinds of things.  They motivate us and help satisfy our basic instincts for belonging, esteem, and self-actualization, the three ‘higher’ needs within Maslov’s Hierarchy of Needs.  We are able to satisfy our appetites for those things here in our blogging world.  And the more of us in here, the easier and quicker it is to find the resources we seek.  You can find just about anything your little heart desires to feast on.  For my selections from the WordPress buffet, I gravitate towards blogs that inspire me, make me think outside of my own little box, and/or share on the same things I am passionate about.

Well, writing this Daily Prompt-inspired post has made me a little creativity hungry so I’m heading into my reader to see what’s on the menu today.  I might even indulge a little and have some dessert, a little treat of humour or some guilty pleasure topic I can read about.

“The sea hath fish for every man.”  ∼   William Camden, lover of antiquities

Image source:  me  –  my 3 kids watching in awe and wonder the sharks and other fish swimming together at the Cleveland Aquarium  –  May 2015