Image from the blog post Watercooler Confidential, "Death by PowerPoint." Click image for original post.
Government malfeasance and bureaucratic incompetence step aside: there’s now a new reason for the US failures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and it’s a product made by Microsoft. According to this widely circulated article in the New York Times, the over-use of PowerPoint, Microsoft’s sleep inducing presentation software, is the new menace threatening the success of the US military adventures in the Middle East. The article cites a growing number of high-ranking military officials who are increasingly critical of the communication platform. The greatest threat to clarity for many of these officials, the paper reports, is not the muddled mess of circles and arrows pictured above, but the emphasis on hierarchical thinking, which, according to several military officers, even those who frequently use PowerPoint, tends to dumb down and generalize the information being conveyed.
“Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable,” said Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, adding “It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control.”
This complaint is, of course nothing new. Edward Tufte makes the near identical argument in his 2003 essay: “The Cognitive Style of Power Point: Pitching Out Corrupts within.” That essay includes a remarkable discussion of how NASA’s over-reliance on PowerPoint may have inadvertently been responsible for the failure of the Space Shuttle Columbia upon re-entry February1, 2003, claiming that reliance upon bulleted information led to a kind of sales pitch mentality, which obfuscated the real threat posed by the debris impact shortly after launch. “The language, spirit, and presentation tool of the pitch culture had penetrated throughout the NASA organization, even into the most serious technical analysis, the survival of the shuttle,” said Tufte.
Could this very well be what happened in May of that same year, when military and administration officials decided to invade Iraq in search of WMDs? Indeed, the actual decision to invade was obviously a cynical fait accompli, manufactured by The White House and Downing Street, but one can only imagine the great number of PowerPoint pitches that made that decision possible, not to mention the number that followed the invasion which helped to justify the continued presence of US troops in the absence of any chemical or nuclear weapons.
Each semester I teach a workshop on presentation basics to several groups of Business Department students here at Baruch, and, despite the continued uncritical reliance upon PowerPoint, or perhaps because of it, it seems like students are beginning to figure out that the templates Microsoft provides are maybe not the best place to begin their presentations. When I tell students “PowerPoint is for your audience, not for you;” when I try to explain the importance of presenting information visually in a clear and objective form; and when I make the suggestion that maybe they avoid using PowerPoint entirely, I don’t receive nearly as many looks of angry consternation as I used to. Perhaps, just like the generals interviewed for the Times piece, these students have been the victims of one too many redundant, unimaginative, and narrow-minded PowerPoint presentation (often from their instructors) and maybe, just maybe, they’re ready to move beyond the tyranny of the bullet-point.
Either way, there is at least one place where the use of PowerPoint may be expected to lose some of its attraction. I just found out that Edward Tufte has been hired by the Obama Administration as a member of the Recovery Independent Advisory Panel, to help investigate and clearly explain the impact of the $787 Billion economic stimulus package passed last year. If only we could now get him to explain credit default swaps to Congress.
Thanks for posting– I’ve (somehow) never heard of Edward Tufte before, and his website is a minor revelation.
I agree with much of what you’ve written here, James, although you end on a note of optimism, which I wish I shared. You’ve seen some of your students become more skeptical in the face of PP, but in my experiences in BPL and ACC, PP assumptions and bad habits are firmly held by junior/senior years. Compounding this sense of pessimism is the increased reliance on the PP’s created by textbook companies, which faculty members often post on Blackboard for students, intending to be helpful. These “official” powerpoints from the publishers convince students that there’s one way to present information, or one way to visualize a chapter.
These are also utilized by many faculty members for their own lectures, and when you’re an adjunct instructor teaching a new class, why not cling to the publisher powerpoint? My (power) point here is that the frequently-poor use of this tool can be found in our classes on every level, not just in what we ask students to produce…
I like that this post avoids the wholesale dismissal of PP as a tool that I’ve seen emerge around this story. Yes, it’s inelegant, and if you do all of your work in it I can see how it could have a negative impact on what you come up with. But the underlying problem goes beyond specific tools; good presenters can shape any tool to their purpose. Bad presenters make bad PowerPoints.
Much of the work we’ve been doing with educational technology is intended to inject into the curriculum opportunities for our students and faculty to engage critically with digital media with the goal of them developing digital/media/visual literacy in as many cases as possible, and fluency in some cases. There’s a guerrilla pedagogy (nod to Matt Gold, who’s also working on this idea) component to this idea, but I’d be much happier if this were a core, above-ground part of the gen ed here at Baruch. Students need a curriculum that forces them to work critically within and through various media in a systematic way. That, in my opinion, is the best weapon against susceptibility to bad PowerPoints (as both producer and receiver).
Luke,
Thanks for the reply. You’re right I do not dismiss PowePoint wholesale, but perhaps I should have. I agree that technologies like PowerPoint are just tools and that tools are only as good as those that use them; however, I’d like to make it clear that there is something built into Microsoft PowerPoint that is fundamentally problematic. The software not only allows bad presentation practices but actually encourages them by offering templates that prioritize simplistic hierarchical thinking. In addition to this, because PowerPoint is a text based program that resembles and is compatible with Microsoft Word, I would argue it encourages presenters to actually begin drafting their presentations within the confines of the PowerPoint software. The implications of doing this are enormous, since for many presenters, the fundamental steps of figuring out what is important and relevant, are lost in the imperative to cram information onto slides. This of course often leads to the dreaded “data dump” presentations that many students, and sadly, many professors, are guilty of pawning off as actual analysis; this happens because the emphasis in PowerPoint is on slides rather than ideas. Frankly, PowerPoint is useful for presenting information visually and really should not be used for anything else. In that sense it’s really just a more efficient and elegant version those old overhead projectors all my science professors used to use. I don’t remember them ever using bullet points, and rarely did they use text.
I agree. I had a discussion (on Twitter) about this the other day, and yet I have to resist placing too much of the blame on PowerPoint. Yes, the templates encourage the type of loathsome work you describe, but at the end of the day, we all have delete buttons and imaginations and the power to bend the software to our needs (to a certain extent). Our goal should be to get our students to understand why they should bypass the templates, which is really a much larger issue than PowerPoint’s inadequacies. When I speak with students or faculty about designing a digital project, I always emphasize the necessity to start with pen and paper and to sketch out a plan and a set of goals that can guide the project through to completion. This method is especially useful for presentations, since presentation software is NOT presentation-planning software. PowerPoint tries to be (as MS Office wants to be a do-it-all location), and that’s where it fails.
I don’t think the medium is the message; I think the message is the byproduct of the interaction between the individual and the medium. Ultimately, we need to equip students to be more powerful in their approaches to these types of tasks so that they can choose and manage tools in a way that more effectively reflects their goals.