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Subject:RE: PowerPoint Makes You Dumb? From:Watson Laughton <wlaughton -at- orphan -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Wed, 17 Dec 2003 11:48:26 -0600
Here's the text:
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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.
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: Goldstein, Dan [mailto:DGoldstein -at- DeusTech -dot- com]
> Sent: Wednesday, December 17, 2003 11:48 AM
> To: TECHWR-L
> Subject: RE: PowerPoint Makes You Dumb?
>
>
>
> Anyone have an alternate URL for this article?
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