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PowerPoint: Killer App?
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Wed, 31 Aug 2005 18:31:37 -0400
Begin forwarded message: From: Ted Dolotta <Ted () Dolotta ORG> Date: August 31, 2005 6:14:22 PM EDT To: dave () farber net Subject: RE: [IP] PowerPoint: Killer App? Reply-To: Ted () Dolotta ORG Dave, For IP, if you wish. It seems to me that the article below by Ruth Marcus is basically a rehash of a December, 2003 piece in the New York Times Magazine by Clive Thompson -- included below. [Also, the last two paragraphs ofthis article are especially worth reading from a historical perspective.]
Speaking of "Killer Apps," I also include below a pointer to a piece inThe Onion that, to put it mildly, is both bizarre and macabre, but relevant
to a discussion of PowerPoint. And finally, I also recommend a piece in The New Yorker Magazine by Louis Menand of two years ago in which he reviews the latest edition of the "Chicago Manual of Style." It is especially notable for a short digression that starts with: "First of all, it is time to speak some truth to power in this country: Microsoft Word is a terrible program. Its terribleness is of a piece with the terribleness of Windows generally, a system so overloaded with icons, menus, buttons, and incomprehensible Help windows that performing almost any function means entering a treacherous wilderness of pop-ups posing alternatives of terrifying starkness: Accept/Decline/Cancel; Logoff/Shut Down/Restart; and the mysterious Do Not Show This Warning Again." [Louis Menand is Distinguished Professor of English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and a staff writer at The New Yorker. He is the author of "The Metaphysical Club," which won the Pulitzer Prize for History and the Francis Parkman Prize in 2002, and "American Studies," a collection of essays. This article appears in the New Yorker issue of October 6, 2003.] Ted Dolotta======================================================================== ======
Article from the New York Times Magazine: PowerPoint Makes You Dumb December 14, 2003 By CLIVE THOMPSON In August, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board at NASA released Volume 1 of its report on why the space shuttle crashed. As expected, the ship's foam insulation was the main cause of the disaster. But the board also fingered another unusual culprit: PowerPoint, Microsoft's well-known ''slideware'' program. NASA, the board argued, had become too reliant on presenting complex information via PowerPoint, instead of by means of traditional ink-and-paper technical reports. When NASA engineers assessed possible wing damage during the mission, they presented the findings in a confusing PowerPoint slide -- so crammed with nested bullet points and irregular short forms that it was nearly impossible to untangle. ''It is easy to understand how a senior manager might read this PowerPoint slide and not realize that it addresses a life-threatening situation,'' the board sternly noted. PowerPoint is the world's most popular tool for presenting information. There are 400 million copies in circulation, and almost no corporate decision takes place without it. But what if PowerPoint is actually making us stupider? This year, Edward Tufte -- the famous theorist of information presentation -- made precisely that argument in a blistering screed called The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint. In his slim 28-page pamphlet, Tufte claimed that Microsoft's ubiquitous software forces people to mutilate data beyond comprehension. For example, the low resolution of a PowerPoint slide means that it usually contains only about 40 words, or barely eight seconds of reading. PowerPoint also encourages users to rely on bulleted lists, a ''faux analytical'' technique, Tufte wrote, that dodges the speaker's responsibility to tie his information together. And perhaps worst of all is how PowerPoint renders charts. Charts in newspapers like The Wall Street Journal contain up to 120 elements on average, allowing readers to compare large groupings of data. But, as Tufte found, PowerPoint users typically produce charts with only 12 elements. Ultimately, Tufte concluded, PowerPoint is infused with ''an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch.'' Microsoft officials, of course, beg to differ. Simon Marks, the product manager for PowerPoint, counters that Tufte is a fan of ''information density,'' shoving tons of data at an audience. You could do that with PowerPoint, he says, but it's a matter of choice. ''If people were told they were going to have to sit through an incredibly dense presentation,'' he adds, ''they wouldn't want it.'' And PowerPoint still has fans in the highest corridors of power: Colin Powell used a slideware presentation in February when he made his case to the United Nations that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Of course, given that the weapons still haven't been found, maybe Tufte is onto something. Perhaps PowerPoint is uniquely suited to our modern age of obfuscation -- where manipulating facts is as important as presenting them clearly. If you have nothing to say, maybe you need just the right tool to help you not say it.http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/14/magazine/14POWER.html? ex=1072424916&ei=1&en=09
6bb72c6217698e Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company======================================================================== ======
Article from The Onion:PORTLAND, OR - Project manager Ron Butler left behind a 48-slide PowerPoint presentation explaining his tragic decision to commit suicide, co- workers
reported Tuesday ... I was particularly intrigued by the quote: "Man, I gotta tell you, it blew me away. That presentation really utilized the full multimedia capabilities of Microsoft's PowerPoint application." [Copy and paste the link below into your browser -- clicking onit doesn't seem to do it -- to read the full story, PowerPoint presentation
and all.] http://theonion.com/news/index.php?issue=4106&n=3======================================================================== =====
-----Original Message----- From: David Farber [mailto:dave () farber net] Sent: Wednesday, August 31, 2005 9:54 AM To: Ip Ip Subject: [IP] PowerPoint: Killer App? Begin forwarded message: From: Richard Forno <rforno () infowarrior org> Date: August 31, 2005 9:03:48 AM EDT To: Infowarrior List <infowarrior () g2-forward org> Cc: Dave Farber <dave () farber net> Subject: PowerPoint: Killer App? (Not to be confused with my own 2002 PowerPoint Manifesto at infowarrior.org. -rf) PowerPoint: Killer App? http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/29/ AR2005082901 444_pf.html By Ruth Marcus Tuesday, August 30, 2005; A17 Did PowerPoint make the space shuttle crash? Could it doom another mission? Preposterous as this may sound, the ubiquitous Microsoft "presentation software" has twice been singled out for special criticism by task forces reviewing the space shuttle disaster. Perhaps I've sat through too many PowerPoint presentations lately, but I think the trouble with these critics is that they don't go far enough: The software may be as much of a mind-numbing menace to those of us who intend to remain earthbound as it is to astronauts. PowerPoint's failings have been outlined most vividly by Yale political scientist Edward Tufte, a specialist in the visual display of information. In a 2003 Wired magazine article headlined "PowerPoint Is Evil" and a less dramatically titled pamphlet, "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint," Tufte argued that the program encourages "faux-analytical" thinking that favors the slickly produced "sales pitch" over the sober exchange of information. Exhibit A in Tufte's analysis is a PowerPoint slide presented to NASA senior managers in January 2003, while the space shuttle Columbia was in the air and the agency was weighing the risk posed by tile damage on the shuttle wings. Key information was so buried and condensed in the rigid PowerPoint format as to be useless. "It is easy to understand how a senior manager might read this PowerPoint slide and not realize that it addresses a life-threatening situation," the Columbia Accident Investigation Board concluded, citing Tufte's work. The board devoted a full page of its 2003 report to the issue, criticizing a space agency culture in which, it said, "the endemic use of PowerPoint" substituted for rigorous technical analysis. But NASA -- like the rest of corporate and bureaucratic America -- seems powerless to resist PowerPoint. Just this month a minority report by the latest shuttle safety task force echoed the earlier concerns: Often, the group said, when it asked for data it ended up with PowerPoints -- without supporting documentation. These critiques are, pardon the phrase, on point, but I suspect that the insidious influence of PowerPoint goes beyond the way it frustrates scientific analysis. The deeper problem with the PowerPointing of America -- the PowerPointing of the planet, actually -- is that the program tends to flatten the most complex, subtle, even beautiful, ideas into tedious, bullet-pointed bureaucratese. I experienced a particularly dreary example of this under a starry Hawaiian sky this year, listening to a talk on astronomy. It was the perfect moment for magical images of distant stars and newly discovered planets. Yet, instead of using technology to transport, the lecturer plodded point-by-point through cookie-cutter slides. The soul-sapping essence of PowerPoint was captured perfectly in a spoof of the Gettysburg Address by computer whiz Peter Norvig of Google. It featured Abe Lincoln fumbling with his computer ("Just a second while I get this connection to work. Do I press this button here? Function-F7?") and collapsing his speech into six slides, complete with a bar chart depicting four score and seven years. For example, Slide 4: "Review of Key Objectives & Critical Success Factors . What makes nation unique -- Conceived in liberty -- Men are equal . Shared vision -- New birth of freedom -- Gov't of/by/for the people." If NASA managers didn't recognize the safety problem, perhaps it's because they were dazed from having to endure too many presentations like this -- the inevitable computer balkiness, the robotic recitation of bullet points, the truncated language of a marketing pitch. Hence the New Yorker cartoon in which the devil, seated at his desk in Hell, interviews a potential assistant: "I need someone well versed in the art of torture -- do you know PowerPoint?" Like all forms of torture, though, PowerPoint degrades its practitioners as well as its victims. Yes, boring slides were plentiful in the pre- PowerPoint era -- remember the overhead projector? Yes, it can help the intellectually inept organize their thoughts. But the seductive availability of PowerPoint and the built-in drive to reduce all subjects to a series of short- handed bullet points eliminates nuances and enables, even encourages, the absence of serious thinking. Really, why think at all when the auto-content wizard can do it for you? The most disturbing development in the world of PowerPoint is its migration to the schools -- like sex and drugs, at earlier and earlier ages. Now we have second-graders being tutored in PowerPoint. No matter that students who compose at the keyboard already spend more energy perfecting their fonts than polishing their sentences -- PowerPoint dispenses with the need to write any sentences at all. Perhaps the politicians who are so worked up about the ill effects of violent video games should turn their attention to PowerPoint instead. In the meantime, Tufte, who's now doing consulting work for NASA, has a modest proposal for its new administrator: Ban the use of PowerPoint. Sounds good to me. After all, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to see the perils of PowerPoint. ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as Ted () Dolotta ORG To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
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