Dark Powerpoint
MS Powerpoint is becoming a hot topic these days, ever since Columbia’s tragedy. This software has been accused to have done so much wrong. According to Edward Tufte’s remarks in the interview by Dan Nadel, Powerpoint (ppt, for short) “encourages lazy, surface-level thinking among presenters and audience members alike”.
I pick up this topic here, thinking up the chat with my boss this afternoon. Most colleagues in my department will go for our Mid-Year conference next week. The comference is an important one, so important that we usually spend a week on the preparation- make ppt slides. It is kind of funny to see people all over the office suddenly opened the same software and dropped down their ordinary schedule and spent all their efforts putting forms and words on piece after piece of slides. Colleagues will call me once and again for questions like “how to make this inserted form more beautiful” or “I want to add such such animation effects into this slide”…
So it is, the ppt season. Whenever it comes, I often recall my school years, in university. In the year of 2002, computers were still fresh and unfamiliar to most university students, and training of using MS office suites was considered as important and necessary. It was the time when I was well-known to schoolmates and even many profs, because I learned all by myself many dazzling tricks and animations and applied them to my presentation slides.
Presentation is show business. Powerpoint is the back-drop. I am an actress. It is as easy as that. An excellent presentation won me high points in classes, however, and luckily, the better I made it, the more I realized it had nothing to do with knowledge, or logic, or information. Yes I gained this point in my precious early years.
And therefore I was not at all surprised to hear accusal of ppt. The waves should have come earlier. As stated by Edward Tufte, “complex topics that are too long to fit on a PowerPoint slide” is only superficial perception of ppt’s dark side. In fact, ‘for maybe 10 or 20 percent of users, PowerPoint improves the presentation, because the users are so disorganized or inept it forces them to have points. But for the other 80 percent there’s some significant degree of intellectual corruption. For statistical data, the damage approaches dementia. And many serious presentations, particularly in business and government, do involve quantitative material.”
In conclusion, ppt can hide the broken logic in one’s argument and presents fraudulent chop logic as illusory truth. When the audience are facinated by the tidy slides, sequent bullets and highlighted points, they tend to believe the logic and content of this presentation are as neat and logical as it looks and sounds like.
In my school years, there was a trick for students to “conquer” mathematical questions asking for proving an equation or sth like a triangle to be a right-angled one. The popular practice was to deduce three steps From the given conditions and then three steps backwards From the conclusion to prove. Finally, put marks for “because” and “thus” in between to link the front and end deductions together.
The deductions could lead anyWhere or nowhere, of course, if the student did not know the right logic behind to solve the problem. However, the format could disguise the two parts of deductions as a logic whole, and it really took a while for experienced teachers to disclose the fake proving. Not to mention, by chance of good fortune, sometimes somehow the two parts did match each other.
Presention in the ppt format is more or less in such a way. It makes dummies look smart, though only in appearance; it wastes time of the smart, but they have to.
To solve this problem, Edward Tufte said:”
- Do something different, but don’t announce it.
- Second, simply use PowerPoint as a slide projector rather than an information tool.
- And third, give everyone in the audience a printed and folded 11 x 17-inch piece of paper, which, according to my data, holds the equivalent of at least 200 to 250 PowerPoint slides. That piece of paper is the one thing an audience can view at its own pace. And paper is also a document, it leaves traces.”
I agree that Powerpoint was only a tool. There is no right or wrong with a tool. Judgment is for humans. But I do hope users all over the world can recognize why this tool was created: to help make the presentation attractive (dazzling), logical (hide the broken with tidy format) and convincing (bury the weak points with piles of materials). In this sense, only when it is ill-used, it is fully used.
That’s why I hate most meetings (Where presentation overwhelms) and most presentations (Where ppt overwhelms). I have been trying to use Excel for everything, and it works well. By doing so I realize that I am no longer what I used to be.
That showing-off child boasting her presentation- she’s gone with ppt tricks.
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WANG Yixin
3 years in FMCG
2 years in Advertising
1 year in IT startup
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