PowerPoint Is Making Us Stupid. Or Vice Versa.
BY Nancy Scola | Friday, April 30 2010
The U.S. military's love affair with PowerPoint got some playful treatment in an Elizabeth Bumiller piece in the New York Times on Monday that was widely circulated. At the article's center was a particular convoluted slide said to show the American military strategy in Afghanistan. Bumiller has one Joint Forces commander colorfully charging that “PowerPoint makes us stupid."
Some agree, and some aren't so sure. The letter-to-the-editor section in the Times today is hosting an intriguing collection of responses to Bumiller's piece, with most pushing back on the idea that the problem is the technology, and one, at least, saying, yes -- the medium is the mess-maker.
In the first batch was a response from Google's research director, Peter Norvig. "They could just as easily have bemoaned bad written reports and summaries," countered Norvig, "and blamed Microsoft Word." A former Air Force lieutenant seconded Norvig's thinking, recalling his service in the '60s, a.k.a. the pre-PowerPoint era. "There were no laptops and no PowerPoint; instead, there were flip charts and Magic Markers," he wrote. "We wasted hours on the charts, but they were just as vague as today’s slide shows." In other words, botched military strategies lead to botched military charts, not the other way around.
Credit: EdwardTufte.comBut another writer echoed the thinking that bad technology can lead to bad thinking, and he did it by citing famed visualizer Edward Tufte's work after the 2003 space shuttle Columbia disaster. Tufte argued, more or less, that PowerPoint is the problem. His intriguing point, citing slide software's "medieval...preoccupation with hierarchical distinctions." In the Columbia case, Tufte decided, PowerPoint was guilty of divorcing meaning from presentation, to the point where the fact that the lives of real humans up in the shuttle were at stake was obscured by bullets and dashes.
An intriguing, if geeky, debate, and one worth wrestling with. Hey, maybe after Tufte's done with helping straighten out Recovery.gov, he can head over to the Pentagon.