PowerPoint: Killer App?

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

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.




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