The Web seems to spawn them. They are so neat. Quick. Like, summarising one’s in a tweet (even though the particular manifesto I’m about to refer to doesn’t like tweets). They also exclude, ostracise. Set up an ‘us’ and ‘them’.
I think men love manifestos. I know, that’s reductive. But. The rest of us who live in the small grey area known as being human know that a manifesto is a limitation. OK, so you can use it to explode boundaries, but too often they are a means to exclude, to erect the boundary.
So. I. will. never. write. a. manifesto.
Here’s one, the Slow Media Manifesto. I almost like it, but then, there are bits I don’t. So it excludes me when it pretends to include me. It’s a rhetorical sleight of hand.
Where I am meant to go? Home, with ball and bat. here’s a bit:
12. Slow Media are progressive not reactionary: Slow Media rely on their technological achievements and the network society’s way of life. It is because of the acceleration of multiple areas of life, that islands of deliberate slowness are made possible and essential for survival. Slow Media are not a contradiction to the speed and simultaneousness of Twitter, Blogs or Social Networks but are an attitude and a way of making use of them.
Some of my media projects are soooo slow. years. Others are tweets. Seconds. They have quick high-falutin’ avant-guard ideas (I think the web killed the avant-guard, except, maybe, for hackers):
High-quality, thoughtful work that pushes the boundaries in many different directions – sustainable, ethical, aesthetic, intellectual, and in terms of community building. A movement which seems to rehabilitate or reinvent an avant-garde practice.
I nearly love this. Why did they have to binarise their aspiration by making it into a manifesto?
