yaka
2003-12-14 03:42:19 UTC
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.''
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.
YaKaLeDo
http://www.yakaledo.cjb.com/
--------------------------------
Nobody should be allowed to think at all.
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.
YaKaLeDo
http://www.yakaledo.cjb.com/
--------------------------------
Nobody should be allowed to think at all.