I am digging deeper into Smalltalk and agile after my check-in this week with Ward.
One question he had that shaped the intention behind fedwiki was particularly intriguing: "How do you write in a wiki that has the feeling of the programming in Smalltalk?"
What is that feeling? Perhaps it is not about the objects or the message passing, but the dynamic between the two?
As I dug deeper into Alan Kay's 
story today to better understand Smalltalk, I came upon an interview with him in Fast Company that was fascinating.
Many topics were covered in this article. But I found this section particularly interesting, especially in light of my exploration of the fedwiki with Ward:
>If you read [Marshall] McLuhan, the first thing you realize is: Wow, if we could make something like a printing press—but its content is the next level of dealing with complexity, beyond what we could do with prose and written-down mathematics and stuff like that—we can actually create a media environment that the acclimation to [which], just like the acclimation to the printing press, would be another level of thought. >And by the way, we need it, because our technology is taking us into a place where we need another level of thought, beyond the level that it took to create it.
Crazy thinking: what if what Ward and his community are actually developing with fedwiki is a new creative media environment, one that incorporates the experience of Smalltalk as a learning language and the meaning of pattern languages?
While the printing press was developed with the concept of movable type, this new creative medium is based on the concept of plug-ins that are "movable blocks".
If, according to McLuhan, the nature of our thinking is shaped by the structure of how we consume information, how might we think differently if we consume information differently, moving from the linear paradigm of the published book, to a spatial experience of hyperlinked, object-based wiki? Might this open up the possibility of "another level of thought"?
Something the might reveal the Potential of Metathinking - another level of thought. Thought that combines objects, patterns and space within the creative tension of taiji's ridgepole. Something that might lead us to Metanoietic Consciousness.
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