Sorry for wasting the list's bandwidth, but for those of you who have sat
through one too many PowerPoint presentations, I submit the following.
Geoff Branch
PowerPoint Makes You Dumb
By CLIVE THOMPSON
Published: December 14, 2003
n 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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