“PowerPoint Makes You Dumb”
This headline from the New York Times is the best headline I’ve read since the infamous “Shatner’s ex-wife sues over horse semen”. The content of the article is pretty damn good too :
- 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.”
I couldn’t agree more. Using PowerPoint makes sense when it’s being used for generic business interests, but it’s being used by NASA?? PowerPoint is a great tool for dumbing down information, but it’s too often used as a template for presenting any information.
Having worked for a big-ass corporation for a few years now, I’ve even encountered people who seem incapable to relay information without it. I was once in a small meeting with a vendor in which a 30-minute PowerPoint presentation was prepared for me and two other people. Information that could easily be presented in a five-minute conversation was instead turned into a sales pitch.
Of course, I’m just the pot calling the kettle black here. When you think about it, isn’t a blog just a dumbed-down version of a newspaper op/ed?
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Greg,
Your blog entry on powerpoint slides was very incisive and a fresh perspective on one more dumb aspect of the corporate world we live in.
Everything really has become a sales pitch and that seems to be about all that regular people will make time to listen to or think about.
Excellent post! I enjoy your blog a lot. I happen to be a big Dean fan as well and do a lot of work for him in the San Gabriel Valley here in So Cal.
Patrick Briggs in Pasadena
Comment by Patrick Briggs — December 16, 2003 @ 11:35 am
I took Edward Tufte’s class in college…his contempt for PowerPoint is palpable.
An interesting sidenote is that Tufte was brought in after the Challenger disaster in order to help explain what happened visually. He’s also a Times consultant, which is why their graphics are spare and easy to read. He’s made millions from hammering home the same points over and over.
Comment by praktike — December 16, 2003 @ 1:51 pm
Hey, Powerpoint’s not so bad in David Byrne’s hands.
http://www.ostrichink.com/dec2003/powerpoint.html
Comment by Kyle — December 16, 2003 @ 2:33 pm
PowerPoint Haters Unite!
POWERPOINT HATERS UNITE!….Microsoft just can’t catch a break. Via The Talent Show, apparently PowerPoint is now being blamed for the space shuttle crash:NASA, the board argued, had become too reliant on presenting complex information via PowerPoint, …
Trackback by Calpundit — December 16, 2003 @ 5:46 pm
“A good craftsman never blames his tools.”
No offense to Tufte, but he’s overly enamored with dense graphical presnetations. He’s just blaming the medium instead the user. The user is the one who’s making the decision what to display. And resolution has nothing to do with it. Anything you can display on a 8-1/2×11 sheet of paper can be put into a Powerpoint slide. Resolution is not the issue.
But speaking of resolution, have you seen the types of charts that Tufte extols? They are incredibly dense. Sure, they might be an elegant way to present large sums of data in a single chart, but they OBFUSCATE. “What was the POINT?” And that’s what at issue.
The NASA scientists put together a confusing table of information. Instead they should have said:
DON’T LAUNCH THE SHUTTLE
- O-rings get brittle at low temperatures
- Damaged o-rings could cause a major catastrophe
- It’s supposed to be cold tomorrow
If you view Tufte’s version, it’s not much better at conveying the important point: STOP THE LAUNCH.
Comment by Out4Blood — December 16, 2003 @ 6:35 pm
Power Point es culpable
?Cu?ntos de vosotros hab?is tenido que realizar una presentaci?n con la simp?tica herramienta de Microsoft? Seguro que muchos. Doy por supuesto que un nada despreciable sector de mi audiencia habr? pasado por el trance de comprimir su conocimiento sobr…
Trackback by Pensamientos Radicalmente Ecl?cticos — December 16, 2003 @ 8:44 pm
SiliconValley.com published a good article back in January by Julia Keller, “Is PowerPoint the devil?”
She discusses the negative impacts on thought of excessive and incompetent PowerPoint use (I used her article as a club with which to beat on Bush’s State of the Union address).
Comment by Martial — December 17, 2003 @ 8:32 am
Does PowerPoint make us stupid? — using actor-network theory
I had come across few times before on pieces describing the potential of PowerPoint to dumb-down people’s way of thinking. The same is suggested in the following CNN article Does PowerPoint make us stupid?. That technology affects social structures and…
Trackback by infosophy: socio-technological rendering of information — January 7, 2004 @ 12:08 pm
Dumb and Dumberer
(SOTU 2004 PowerPoint, Bush Doctrine PowerPoint)
Comment by Mark — January 30, 2004 @ 5:33 pm