The declaration right in the title that they, the enlightened ones, are condescending to offer "clues" to the clueless (us, their benighted readers), and proclamation that their opinion piece is a "manifesto" tells me that the writers are a little too invested in the campus radical romance of heroic revolutionaries standing above the peasants preaching their utopian vision for me to care much about their talk about hyperlinks subverting hierarchy and such silliness.
That doesn't mean it's all wrong. There are some good comments in TCM. It's just that I find collections of simpler articles combining charts of data over time with admitted speculations about what it might mean and, if so, what the implications could be, to be far more useful and, yes, "enlightening" than any "manifesto" I've ever seen.
Hi, I'm one of the authors. I can certainly see why you'd take it as condescending. At the time, it was generally taken in the sense that we meant it: we were trying to articulate what Web users understood but the media and most businesses weren't getting.
Remember that in 1999, the Web wasn't as mainstream, and many users felt that being on the Web was a special experience. There was an "us vs. them" feeling, where the "us" were people enthusiastic about the Web and excited about how it was (we thought) transforming our lives, our culture, and our institutions. So the clues were absolutely not for our readers who, we assumed, were part of the Web "us," but for the media and businesses who weren't on the Web or weren't part of the Web culture, and who yet were attempting to impose their understanding upon it.
Now the Web has become such an accepted part of everyone's lives in our culture that it doesn't feel nearly as much like Us vs. Them. I think that explains why the Manifesto now reads as condescending, whereas at the time it was taken (at least by the readers who liked it) as an articulation of what they already felt.
Yes; back in '99 business didn't get it. I was working for Chase Manhattan in London at the time, and I remember my colleagues and I laughing when we heard senior management had asked if they could buy the internet!
Agreed. It's a rhetorical technique that always makes me question the credibility of the writer (in any work, not just TCM). It always makes the writer sound like they lack skepticism and may be drinking their own Kool-Aid.
That doesn't mean it's all wrong. There are some good comments in TCM. It's just that I find collections of simpler articles combining charts of data over time with admitted speculations about what it might mean and, if so, what the implications could be, to be far more useful and, yes, "enlightening" than any "manifesto" I've ever seen.