Posted on Facebook: Just hit on the definition for what I believe will be the next major generational change in computers, the Internet, distributed social networks & visual machine language: organic.

Cu Mo’s Q: I am very interested in your thoughts. Please share more.

[And now my response...]

I’ve just been thinking that as the world of software and online interactivity grows beyond epic proportions that there is a greater need for very thorough abstraction, symbiosis, and visual/modular representation of all its parts.  Organic to me implies that the Internet, the beast that it is, will come to behave more like an organism, with coherent parts, ones that move and work together, like an animal or human.

I’m coming at this both in terms of development and as a participant.

We have several tools right now that approach something more organic — wysiwygs, CMS systems, blogging and social networking tools, etc.  There are all kinds of media creative tools, but everything is fragmented, and, unfortunately, as the Internet grows ever larger, it just all gets more complicated.  APIs crop up hither and thither, new languages, new tools, new standards, new open source tools, more identity and communication protocols.

But there is also a movement afoot right now to make data and identity more portable and standardized via distributed social networks and so-called microstreams.  (Both are terms, incidentally, which I think are inadequate for the longer projected needs of the Internet…still…)  Joseph Smarr, one of the advocates of this movement (called “DiSo” by some advocates), has called what’s coming a “sea change,” and I think he’s right.

(You can read a little bit about the movement here http://bit.ly/PcQHN and here http://diso-project.org/. If you want more sources, I can provide.)

Anyway, I see this online identity and data ubiquity as just the beginning.  The next stage in it all I believe will *require* something more organic, i.e., there will be no way to scale or really connect all this data without really powerful tools that can drill down or project up to all facets of the computer world.

This is a difficult concept to explain, and I’ve been working on a way of explaining it for a while.  I conceive a world where computer software and programs can be managed in extremely powerful ways, beyond our crude codified approaches.  Think of it as art rather than programming.  Or for some it will be more like puzzles or games.  Engineering and Math all have their place, and are obviously indispensible, but I personally believe the Internet will see its greatest maturity and potential when almost every aspect of computational power can be controlled or handled by a very visual — read ORGANIC — approach. Remember bits and bytes? Why can’t we flip them visually, or look at the stream of them float by, like DNA in synthesis. Or go up a level and see code flex like muscles, or examine the shell or structure of an operating system, like looking at the bones of a skeleton.

This is a start for explaining what’s in my brain. However, when I think of a really good way to convey the story developing in my head, I’ll be sure to drop you a line.  I’ll be posting it either here on my blog (so check back) or over at ArxPoetica.com, an artistic effort I’m spearheading with a few others.

Thanks for letting me ruminate on this for a bit!  Hope I didn’t overwhelm your wall, ha, ha!

So I created a new Google Code project for a crazy idea that’s been brewing in my head.  This post explains just a little bit of the idea, as does the Google Code project page.

Right now it’s still a little vague in my head, but I figure I should start somewhere.  Hopefully other developers can help refine it.

Distributed media streams based on existing machine language.

Update: (later today) I was just doing a search on micro formats to try and understand some things a little better, and lo and behold, my Google Code project showed up: http://bit.ly/w55uD

Fun that.

But then, consider the model in terms of art.  If the first item is the object itself, then this might be some peice of artwork, for example, sheetmusic to some favorite song.  The particular iteration of the object then, its member functions and data, might be expressed in another, more seemingly literal way.  A function (or methodology, craft, or manner of artistry) might represent how the sheetmusic is written, transcribed, sung, played, or changed: different functions to different ends, all operating on the same object.  The data (or medium of art—in this case music) could be the actual placement of notes and other factors such as time signature, key, staff numbers, clefs, and so forth.  Consider the following image (which I found via Google, but am adapting for my purposes):

Here we have the self-contained object.  The data is the notes, the staffs (two of them), with two clefs, and four measures in a round of music.  A method (function) for changing the notes might be, for example, transposition.  Here we might affect a change in all the data with one function, and move all the notes up or down the staff.  The data, a particular medium, namely transcribed, written music, is contained in a singular object, which is the song itself.  All contained within the object.

Kind of a fun concept, and not too far off from what object-oriented programming is all about in any case, except that it can be fun to think of in terms of literal expression, not to mention potential new media application.