Blow up yer slideware
I've actually been quite fortunate during my career in high tech in avoiding PowerPoint to a surprising degree. So much so, that of late, I've begun to suspect I might actually be the anti-PowerPoint or something simliar--an odd bump in existence, a node of nearly pure anti-slide with which bullet points coexist only provisionally and cautiously--a nexus of concentrated hostility to concision which clip art flees in instinctive terror.
I mean hell, look at my writing style. Need you look any further to grasp that your not always so humble author and a software that comfortably only puts about a few dozen words on a page just aren't going to get along terribly well?
And yeah, I hate PowerPoint. Passionately. I used it successfully exactly once, in my career, when I cobbled together a pair of computers to act as the broadcast heads for a textual cable news service run by the newspaper for which I built them. Essentially, I used the slideware as an inexpensive means by which the publisher could script the scrolling of short blurbs of text, and plop up the occasional paid ad, for broadcast over the local cable system.
And that's all I've ever found it to be any bloody use for doing. Beyond this, I've always personally suspected it was evil. First piece of evidence: anything done in it was usually pretty ugly. If not spectacularly ugly.
Second piece of evidence: no one ever seems to communicate anything that actually needs saying via Power Point. I mean, would you tell someone their mother just died with a PowerPoint presentation? Would you tell your girl you loved her with a PowerPoint presentation?
And if any of you answered 'yes' to either of these questions, would you please get help?
I can't claim that I ever particularly analyzed this hostility of mine in any great detail. It was obvious enough to me, however, that there was something uniquely bureaucratic and deadening about the accursed software. I knew it had a weirdly soporific quality. I knew that almost anything said with the assistance of slideware somehow immediately becomes vastly less interesting. I'm pretty sure if you took almost any great work of erotica and attempted to adapt it (and no, please don't any of you sick bastards out there actually do this) into a PowerPoint presentation, it would immediately cease to be even mildly sexy.
I mean, right, 'lady_chatterlys_lover.ppt'. Thanks, but no.
So it's a perversely happy coincidence that, this week, in a truly rare event, I did actually have to sketch a few slides for someone else's presentation (by way of helping him do a precis of some lab work I did recently)--happy only insofar as it led to the following happenstance: when I chose to bitch about the stultifying banality of all that is PowerPoint to a well-read colleague, he mentioned a few recent bits on Wired on the precise same subject.
And having read said bits, I really have to say: yeah, Edward Tufte's PowerPoint Is Evil pretty much hits it on the head. A few key excerpts:
But I'd also like to say: PowerPoint and its various slideware clones, while perhaps the most obvious and egregious offenders, are really only part of a much larger phenomenon, the way I see it. They're the obvious evidence for the corporatization of communication, but the corporatization of communication is everywhere in our culture--it's a much more widespread phenomenon than is merely the poorly considered use of such software. And seen as parts of a larger whole, the ubiquity of the larger phenomenon--manipulative PR techniques designed to foster the promotion of ideas and attitudes sans any rational argument justifying them--is terrifying.
Thinking about it a little, I begin to suspect I can reasonably identify (1) the vacuous non-communications of electoral campaigns in most democracies, (2) the general shamelessness of political PR to sell policy decisions to constituencies they actually directly harm, (3) the prevalance of emotive, irrational appeals in product advertising, (4) the (relative, in recent terms) resurgence of emotive, irrational religious movements (and yes, I suppose 'irrational religious movement' is probably a redundancy), and (5) apparently reflexive anti-intellectualism dismissing the conclusions of empirically-based research into complex phenomena in blind allegiance to traditional superstitions and pre-existing prejudices (yes, we're talking particularly about creationism here, though energy industry salvos against climate science also fit this category) as essentially all being facets of the same phenomenon. All, it seems to me, have in common the same willingness to employ communications media not to inform but to distort and to confuse. All, it seems to me, achieve much of this through encapsulation, through careful omission of inconvenient complexities that might break up simple narratives with mass appeal. The devil in the details is never seen because the details are never seen; we are given one slide at a time, with maybe a dozen words on it, in 36-point type. The fine print, as it is incompatible with the medium, does not appear.
Chomsky (a man near and dear to my heart for his own utter inability to say anything in anything less than about fifty pounds of manuscript paper) noted an interesting relationship between keeping it simple and keeping it conformist, and did so quite some time ago. Chomsky argued (at some length, quite naturally) that especially when dissenting from widely held opinions, the requirement for unreasonable concision can be quite crippling to the effort. Sure, you can parrot the party line in short, glib sentences between commercial breaks. But if you try to take that same party line apart, you're going to need a lot more space to build and defend your case. And PowerPoint and its many fellow travellers (the commercial television format, the commercial radio format, even much of the daily newspaper format) all have that same property which tends to frustrate such efforts: a tendency to encourage presentations which keep it short, and broken into tiny little bits.
Consider also this: Contrasting the style of writing in which you can sell a religious dogma (short, simple axioms good, travel well, look good on bumper stickers) versus that required if you're actually trying to communicate the nuance of any significant body of interesting research into the natural world (in which yes, there may be some quite simple principles that can be expounded, but keeping it simple throughout probably means you haven't told about three quarters of the story), again, it seems to me, it becomes clear why an unreasonable love for media that foster concise, encapsulated communications is no friend of rationality, no ally of genuinely understanding reality in all its frequently delightful complexity.
It isn't, as I noted, all about concision or its absence, either, and keeping it as short as you can without actually bastardizing the message is actually of itself, probably a good thing for any argument. The trouble arises, however, when making it shorter (and 'punchier') regardless of what content will survive such artificial constraints becomes a value all on its own.
So perhaps what we need most now as antidote to this phenomenon is a revolt of annoyingly verbose writers congenitally incapable of writing anything shorter than about 5,000 words--and tending most strongly to top 20,000 to 30,000 even when drafting a postcard to friends while on vacation.
Oh, ye endlessly overwritten, ye hopelessly wordy, flock to my banner. We've nothing to lose but those pesky maximum word restrictions anyway...
And when we have taken the capital, I promise you this:
We will burn every copy of PowerPoint.
I mean hell, look at my writing style. Need you look any further to grasp that your not always so humble author and a software that comfortably only puts about a few dozen words on a page just aren't going to get along terribly well?
And yeah, I hate PowerPoint. Passionately. I used it successfully exactly once, in my career, when I cobbled together a pair of computers to act as the broadcast heads for a textual cable news service run by the newspaper for which I built them. Essentially, I used the slideware as an inexpensive means by which the publisher could script the scrolling of short blurbs of text, and plop up the occasional paid ad, for broadcast over the local cable system.
And that's all I've ever found it to be any bloody use for doing. Beyond this, I've always personally suspected it was evil. First piece of evidence: anything done in it was usually pretty ugly. If not spectacularly ugly.
Second piece of evidence: no one ever seems to communicate anything that actually needs saying via Power Point. I mean, would you tell someone their mother just died with a PowerPoint presentation? Would you tell your girl you loved her with a PowerPoint presentation?
And if any of you answered 'yes' to either of these questions, would you please get help?
I can't claim that I ever particularly analyzed this hostility of mine in any great detail. It was obvious enough to me, however, that there was something uniquely bureaucratic and deadening about the accursed software. I knew it had a weirdly soporific quality. I knew that almost anything said with the assistance of slideware somehow immediately becomes vastly less interesting. I'm pretty sure if you took almost any great work of erotica and attempted to adapt it (and no, please don't any of you sick bastards out there actually do this) into a PowerPoint presentation, it would immediately cease to be even mildly sexy.
I mean, right, 'lady_chatterlys_lover.ppt'. Thanks, but no.
So it's a perversely happy coincidence that, this week, in a truly rare event, I did actually have to sketch a few slides for someone else's presentation (by way of helping him do a precis of some lab work I did recently)--happy only insofar as it led to the following happenstance: when I chose to bitch about the stultifying banality of all that is PowerPoint to a well-read colleague, he mentioned a few recent bits on Wired on the precise same subject.
And having read said bits, I really have to say: yeah, Edward Tufte's PowerPoint Is Evil pretty much hits it on the head. A few key excerpts:
The standard PowerPoint presentation elevates format over content, betraying an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch...
...PowerPoint's pushy style seeks to set up a speaker's dominance over the audience. The speaker, after all, is making power points with bullets to followers. Could any metaphor be worse? Voicemail menu systems? Billboards? Television? Stalin?...
...Audiences consequently endure a relentless sequentiality, one damn slide after another. When information is stacked in time, it is difficult to understand context and evaluate relationships.
-- from Edward Tufte, PowerPoint Is Evil, in Wired
Yeah, Tufte nails it nicely. I mean, honestly, so much that is worth knowing is about integrated knowledge--knowledge of entire contexts, things you really can't convey terribly well in a single slide with clip art and bullet points. PowerPoint, I'd argue, like so much in the contemporary world, isn't just about concision but about encapsulation. And taking things in little bits, while actually a necessary process in learning, does a disservice to many fields of inquiry if you never actually get 'round to putting the bits back together into a larger whole.But I'd also like to say: PowerPoint and its various slideware clones, while perhaps the most obvious and egregious offenders, are really only part of a much larger phenomenon, the way I see it. They're the obvious evidence for the corporatization of communication, but the corporatization of communication is everywhere in our culture--it's a much more widespread phenomenon than is merely the poorly considered use of such software. And seen as parts of a larger whole, the ubiquity of the larger phenomenon--manipulative PR techniques designed to foster the promotion of ideas and attitudes sans any rational argument justifying them--is terrifying.
Thinking about it a little, I begin to suspect I can reasonably identify (1) the vacuous non-communications of electoral campaigns in most democracies, (2) the general shamelessness of political PR to sell policy decisions to constituencies they actually directly harm, (3) the prevalance of emotive, irrational appeals in product advertising, (4) the (relative, in recent terms) resurgence of emotive, irrational religious movements (and yes, I suppose 'irrational religious movement' is probably a redundancy), and (5) apparently reflexive anti-intellectualism dismissing the conclusions of empirically-based research into complex phenomena in blind allegiance to traditional superstitions and pre-existing prejudices (yes, we're talking particularly about creationism here, though energy industry salvos against climate science also fit this category) as essentially all being facets of the same phenomenon. All, it seems to me, have in common the same willingness to employ communications media not to inform but to distort and to confuse. All, it seems to me, achieve much of this through encapsulation, through careful omission of inconvenient complexities that might break up simple narratives with mass appeal. The devil in the details is never seen because the details are never seen; we are given one slide at a time, with maybe a dozen words on it, in 36-point type. The fine print, as it is incompatible with the medium, does not appear.
Chomsky (a man near and dear to my heart for his own utter inability to say anything in anything less than about fifty pounds of manuscript paper) noted an interesting relationship between keeping it simple and keeping it conformist, and did so quite some time ago. Chomsky argued (at some length, quite naturally) that especially when dissenting from widely held opinions, the requirement for unreasonable concision can be quite crippling to the effort. Sure, you can parrot the party line in short, glib sentences between commercial breaks. But if you try to take that same party line apart, you're going to need a lot more space to build and defend your case. And PowerPoint and its many fellow travellers (the commercial television format, the commercial radio format, even much of the daily newspaper format) all have that same property which tends to frustrate such efforts: a tendency to encourage presentations which keep it short, and broken into tiny little bits.
Consider also this: Contrasting the style of writing in which you can sell a religious dogma (short, simple axioms good, travel well, look good on bumper stickers) versus that required if you're actually trying to communicate the nuance of any significant body of interesting research into the natural world (in which yes, there may be some quite simple principles that can be expounded, but keeping it simple throughout probably means you haven't told about three quarters of the story), again, it seems to me, it becomes clear why an unreasonable love for media that foster concise, encapsulated communications is no friend of rationality, no ally of genuinely understanding reality in all its frequently delightful complexity.
It isn't, as I noted, all about concision or its absence, either, and keeping it as short as you can without actually bastardizing the message is actually of itself, probably a good thing for any argument. The trouble arises, however, when making it shorter (and 'punchier') regardless of what content will survive such artificial constraints becomes a value all on its own.
So perhaps what we need most now as antidote to this phenomenon is a revolt of annoyingly verbose writers congenitally incapable of writing anything shorter than about 5,000 words--and tending most strongly to top 20,000 to 30,000 even when drafting a postcard to friends while on vacation.
Oh, ye endlessly overwritten, ye hopelessly wordy, flock to my banner. We've nothing to lose but those pesky maximum word restrictions anyway...
And when we have taken the capital, I promise you this:
We will burn every copy of PowerPoint.
posted by AJM at 4:27 a.m. (Permanent Link)
