PowerPoint: Killer App?

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

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 of
this article are especially worth reading from a historical  
perspective.]

Speaking of "Killer Apps," I also include below a pointer to a piece in
The 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 on
it 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.
>
>
>
>
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