Digital Athena
  • Blog
  • Essays and Book Reviews
  • Contact Us
  • About Digital Athena
  • Index of Essays and Reviews

PowerPoint: The Tyranny of the Digital

12/18/2009

0 Comments

 
Powerpoint. Some people can take it or leave it. Edward Tufte, on the other hand, abhors the program. The Yale political scientist/graphics expert has laid out all his objections to the ubiquitous program in an essay called "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint" (see www.edwardtufte.com).  Basically, Tufte says, Microsoft’s popular presentation software creates a forum that focuses on the presenter, at the expense of both the audience and the content. It creates a situation in which format trumps all, breaking any story or argument into fragments, sounds bites of text delivered in a dazzling array of bullet points. The results are closer to a sales pitch than any kind of nuanced or complex set of observations.  

Tufte argues that PowerPoint encourages impoverished thinking, vagueness, overly generalized statements, poor evidence, and very little real information. By leaving out the connections between the bullet points, PowerPoint is “faux-analytical.” Bullets appear to organize thought but what they really do is destroy thought—they make us stupid.

To someone who avoids PowerPoint whenever possible, Tufte’s arguments make a lot of sense. There is however one overarching point where he goes too far. Tufte writes:

“The metaphor behind the PowerPoint cognitive style is the software corporation itself. That is, a big bureaucracy engaged in computer programming (deeply hierarchical, nested, highly structured, relentlessly sequential, one-short-line-at-a-time) and marketing (fast-pace, misdirection, advocacy not analysis, slogan thinking, branding, exaggerated claims, marketplace ethics).”

Tufte proceeds to associate PowerPoint with all hegemonic systems from the Roman Empire to Stalin. He goes too far—and in the wrong direction in my opinion. PowerPoint and Microsoft may share a cognitive style but its derivation stems more from the essential principle inherent in both digital technology and modern corporation: an advanced, relentless, and massive division of labor.

Software is code, lines and lines of codes, that runs sequentially with many conditional branching statements (if-then statements) and a hierarchy of interacting software objects (sets of code), all of which manipulate information in a logical succession of small steps. Each step contains explicit instructions. An entire sequence of such instructions, that is, a software program, works more like a calculator than a “thinking machine.”

To build software programmers must break down processes into discrete steps, effectively systematizing and standardizing how work is done. Many software products are rigid in how they allow people to work. PowerPoint, with its discrete slides and panoply of hierarchical bullet points supports, nay encourages, a bald declarative style without any room for ambiguity or subtlety. Most workers get caught up in the formatting and the special features, such as animation, leaving content in a decidedly secondary position. To paraphrase Henry David Thoreau, they become tools of our tools, caught in the tyranny of the digital. 
0 Comments

Your comment will be posted after it is approved.


Leave a Reply.

    RSS Feed

    Archives

    February 2014
    January 2014
    December 2013
    November 2013
    August 2013
    July 2013
    June 2013
    May 2013
    April 2013
    March 2013
    February 2013
    January 2013
    December 2012
    August 2012
    July 2012
    June 2012
    May 2012
    April 2012
    March 2012
    January 2012
    December 2011
    November 2011
    October 2011
    June 2011
    May 2011
    April 2011
    March 2011
    February 2011
    December 2010
    July 2010
    June 2010
    May 2010
    March 2010
    February 2010
    January 2010
    December 2009

    Categories

    All
    AI
    Computer Models
    Convergence
    Digital Software
    Division Of Labor
    E Readers
    Facebook
    Financial Markets
    Google
    Innovation Business Cycle
    Internet
    Knowledge
    Learning
    Media Use
    Myths
    Powerpoint
    Robots
    Screen Life
    Screen Life
    Search
    Social Networking
    Targeted Marketing
    Technology And Jobs
    The Nature Of The Digital
    The Nature Of The Digital
    Video Games
    Web 2.0
    Wikis
    Youth

    Cynthia's Blog Plan

    I'll aim to post here a few times a month, based on current events and my ongoing research.