Saw this quote on a recent Quora answer from Alan Kay "since the computer could simulate anything that could be described — it was a true metamedium, and that meant there were likely media on the computer that could only exist because of the computer". What kind of media could only exist on a computer? A few I can come up with - simulations of phenomena, games, pretty much anything with a time based dimension (except 2D+time, like movies, those existed before)

Is the internet itself a medium?

That's a fair point about lack of specificity. I guess where I was going with the question was - are there computational media we haven't even thought of yet? Although that gets to the question of what exactly is a medium

I choose to believe the answer is yes, based only on the fact that I'd rather live in that world.

I was just saying to a friend, "If you can't dream it, you can't be it."

@Naveen Michaud-Agrawal Observation: a colleague solved a hoary problem using Blender (problem: flight simulator view on a wrap-around screen). He wouldn’t have bothered to even approach the problem on paper using standard mathematical notation, yet was inspired to try and managed to successfully solve this in only a few evenings. My meta-conclusion is that this is evidence of computers begin a medium different from papyrus-and-ink and equational-thinking based on 500-yo Gutenbergian technology.

yeah — simulation!

If you define "simulation" widely enough (including in particular interactive simulation such as games), then that's the most important category of computational media from my point of view. If you add "internet" to "computers", you get a large family of collaborative media that have no equivalent in the pre-computer world. This Slack, for example, but also Git repositories. CRDT-based real-time collaboration tools. Also interesting as a category are media that support human-computer collaboration at larger scale (in terms of number of humans). The semantic Web, LLMs, etc.

… add "internet" to "computers” …

➕ My opinion: “internet” vs. “computer” == MIMD vs. SIMD, parallelism vs. half-parallelism, e.g. GPUs heavily optimized for a narrow use-case, or, adding baubles to current PLs to enable tortured MIMD programming at, essentially, an “assembler” level, or, …

I see "many humans" as the main feature of "internet" not "many processors".

it's both though, i think? that's what's new about it.

IMO: humans experiencing “free will” are the same thing as MIMD. This new medium is capable of MIMD, but we’re strangling it by applying SIMD thinking to it.

Yes, it's both. But so far, "many humans" has had a much higher impact on our work habits than "many networked computers". The latter are used in ways that try to be mostly invisible, except to their administrators. That's what "agentic AI" wants to change.

One: Social Media. Is there any other place a flow of real-time information automatically tailored by personally preference? I was reading usenet 30+ years ago, then moved in to posting on message boards and livejournal a few years later in my late teens. LJ is the first I would consider a "social media" platform. I have watched every subsequent one roll out until it became what it is today. Two: with social media came the infinite scroll, which is a kind of weaponization of the format.

Wikis. They sorta-blended into what we now feel as simply "internet" (or if you get technical they're just "hypertext") yet they were invented/discovered at some point, and curiously the invention is largely social but was enabled by technical affordances (most notably, history + easy revert) and produced a media that has a distinct feel to it. P.S. Wiki walks are addictive too, but i'd say better than infinite scrolling(?)

Wiki walking vs. infinite scrolling reminds me of the blog post that everyone cites when talking about digital gardens: "The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral" , by Mike Caulfield.