The Perils of PowerPoint

1. Low resolution unable to capture complex data, tables and charts
2. Bullet points can oversimplify thought and promote weak reasoning. Disguises loosely connected points.
3. Linear (paratactic) structure undermines cohesion and complexity. Hard to relate or compare items.
4. Difficulty translating complex scientific ideas and spatial reasoning into ppt templates
5. Fragmented narrative and data
6. Preoccupation with format (“phluff”) not content
7. Decontextualizes ideas (in presentation and also later when deck is archived and shared context disappears).

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Yates & Orlikowski

• Some consequences of the constraints that the PowerPoint tool imposes on presenters [include] the limited, fragmented, and flattened content appearing in bulleted form. Indeed, we see consequences for the audience (and sometimes even for the presenter) that include limited comprehension, information overload (“death by PowerPoint”), lack of reflection, idea fragmentation, and reductionism.
• The strong linearity of most PowerPoint presentations is shaped by the sequentiality of slides and the difficulty of viewing them in any other order. This factor may contribute to a tendency to defer questions to the end of the presentation..thus reducing the speaker’s responsiveness to the audience

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• “The PowerPoint Presentation and Its Corollaries: How Genres Shape Communicative Action in Organizations.” JoAnne Yates and Wanda Orlikowski

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• The bigger problems occur, however, when the PowerPoint texts are “repurposed” for use in a setting where temporal and spatial symmetry are no longer present (e.g., the deck-as-deliverable, the Web-based “presentation,” etc.).
• Such stand-alone “presentations” (as they are still typically called, even though no presenter accompanies the visual aids) lack the more detailed context and nuanced content of a live presentation or of a written report, and thus contribute to communicative ambiguity and loss of meaning.

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The Politics of Powerpoint?

• “PowerPoint is installed on more than a billion computers. It is the indispensable medium for presentation, one of the most ubiquitous software applications in the world
• If we, as humanists, are to imagine futures with computational tools we will need to critically analyze and design forms of intellectual middleware that materialize relationships between methods of interpretation, data objects, and tools. We will need to ask questions like “How does PowerPoint think and how would we like presentation software to think?”
• Robles-Anderson and Svensson, “One damn slide after another” Computational Culture, 2016

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• “By inadvertently privileging the relationships between personal computing and networked forms of sociality, cultural analysts have missed the ways personal computing transformed public culture, the ways software reconfigured the conditions of collective life. Engaging with such reconfigurations requires taking software and its extended materiality seriously.”
• Robles-Anderson and Svensson argue for a “neo-Winnerian” approach that focuses on the materiality of everyday software tools, and the creation of altertives by universities.

Rise of the PowerPoint Haters

• "Power corrupts and PowerPoint corrupts absolutely." Vint Cerf, Internet pioneer
• "PowerPoint can give the illusion of coherence and content when there really isn't very much coherence or content." Edward Miller
• “PowerPoint is Evil” Edward Tufte.  

The “death by powerpoint” meme

Tufte & the “Cognitive Style of PowerPoint”

• Edward Tufte has written the most devastating critiques of powerpoint and the “cognitive style” it promotes.�
• Tufte is famous for his work on data visualization and visual communication. He charges that PowerPoint destroys “the capacity for sustained, critical thought.” 
• PowerPoint stacks information in time, forcing audiences to think sequentially rather than comparatively, associatively rather than analytically.
• Visual reading “works more effectively when relevant information is shown side by side. Often the more intense the detail, the greater the clarity and understanding.” PowerPoint prevents detailed comparisons between slides and makes it impossible to trace relationships between parts and wholes.

Space Shuttle Columbia

• The Columbia Accident Investigation Board agreed with Tufte’s analysis of the PowerPoint slides used at NASA:

• “It is easy to understand how a senior manager might read this PowerPoint slide and not realize that it addresses a life-threatening situation. At many points during its investigation, the Board was surprised to receive similar presentation slides from NASA officials in place of technical reports. The Board views the endemic use of PowerPoint briefing slides instead of technical papers as an illustration of the problematic methods of technical communication at NASA.^”

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Powerpoint & Academic Presentations

• “Why don't conference organizers request that speakers instead send a written document that covers the main points of their presentation with appropriate detail and depth? A Word or PDF document that is written in a concise and readable fashion with a bibliography and links to even more detail, for those who are interested, would be far more effective. When I get back home from the conference, do organizers really think I'm going to "read" pages full of PowerPoint slides? One does not read a printout of someone's two-month old PowerPoint slides; one guesses, decodes, and attempts to glean meaning from the series of low-resolution titles, bullets, charts, and clipart. At least they do that for a while...until they give up. With a written document, however, there is no reason for shallowness or ambiguity (assuming one writes well).
• To be different and effective, use a well-written, detailed document for your handout and well-designed, simple, intelligent graphics for your visuals. Now that would be atypical.”��(Professor Elizabeth Lawley, director of the Lab for Social Computing, RIT.)

• In the 2000s high-tech CEOs like IBM’s Lou Gerstner, Apple’s Steve Jobs, and Sun Microsystem’s Scott McNealy started blaming organizational inefficiency on powerpoint and even banned its use….

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PowerPoint causes problems in the military?

• “Military commanders sounded like critical cultural analysts as they warned the public about the dangers of decontextualized statements, the conferral of false authority on dubious knowledge, the risks of misrepresentation inherent in software visualizations…commanders worried as the program became “deeply embedded in a military culture that has come to rely on PowerPoint’s hierarchical ordering of a confused world.’” �
• (Robles-Anderson and Svensson, “One damn slide after another” Computational Culture, 2016).

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• Commanders warned that distinctions between reporting, decision-making, and archiving were blurring. The decontextualization of military actions reduced war to “just a targeting exercise,” “creat[ing] the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” and keeping people from taking into account “political, economic, and ethnic forces.” 
• (Robles-Anderson and Svensson, “One damn slide after another” Computational Culture, 2016).

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• “Almost all Air Force documents today, for example, are presented as PowerPoint briefings. They are almost never printed and rarely stored. When they are saved, they are often unaccompanied by any text. As a result, in many cases, the briefings are incomprehensible." -- Fred Kaplan, Slate June 4, 2003 “The End of History”

• In a widely circulated 2010 New York Times article General Stanley McChrystal explicitly linked strategic failures in Afghanistan to poor presentation visuals quipping, “When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war.”⁷

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Thomas Ricks's on Powerpoint in Military Planning

• “McKiernan…couldn't get Franks to issue clear orders that explicitly stated what he wanted done, how he wanted to do it, and why. Rather, Franks passed along PowerPoint briefing slides that he had shown to Rumsfeld. "It's quite frustrating the way this works, but the way we do things nowadays is combatant commanders brief their products in PowerPoint up in Washington to OSD and Secretary of Defense... In lieu of an order, or a frag [fragmentary] order, or plan, you get a set of PowerPoint slides... [T]hat is frustrating, because nobody wants to plan against PowerPoint slides.“
• That reliance on slides rather than formal written orders seemed to some military professionals to capture the essence of Rumsfeld's amateurish approach to war planning. "Here may be the clearest manifestation of OSD's contempt for the accumulated wisdom of the military profession and of the assumption among forward thinkers that technology - above all information technology - has rendered obsolete the conventions traditionally governing the preparation and conduct of war," commented retired Army Col. Andrew Bacevich, a former commander of an armoured cavalry regiment. "To imagine that PowerPoint slides can substitute for such means is really the height of recklessness." It was like telling an automobile mechanic to use a manufacturer's glossy sales brochure to figure out how to repair an engine.

• Colin Powell’s 2003 UN presentation on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
• Powell exploited PowerPoint’s ability to weave text, audio recordings, images, and videos into “an accumulation of facts” that demonstrated the government’s powers of surveillance.
• David Stark and Verena Paravel argue that PowerPoint’s capacity to re-present materials gathered and produced elsewhere in front of eye-witnesses signals a dramatic transformation in the “geography of persuasion.”

Powerpoint slides by Colin Powell at the United Nations in 2003 that �were used to justify war. It is the labels, the captions, and the �surrounding text that turn the images from one thing into another.”