Is PowerPoint a moral issue?

In reference to an article by Edward Tufte titled PowerPoint Is Evil, (yes that's the title and the sub-head is "Power Corrupts. PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutely"), Signal + Noise writes here:

For the record, I don't use or particularly like PowerPoint; my particular disorder leads me to spend hours of my life creating my own formatting tools in the interest of total aesthetic control. (Coming soon to this blog; I've been restraining myself.) So being rather obsessive on the subject myself and in general agreement with him, I am naturally among Tufte's most sympathetic audience. But he loses me a bit on this one.

Loses me, too. People write dumb things with pens. PowerPoint  is a tool. One can misuse a tool and maybe lots of people are mis-using PowerPoint. So the answer is to give them better training, not to destroy the tool itself. No? I have never actually used PowerPoint; the few and boring lectures I have heard which did use it were boring because of, I always assumed, the lecturer, not the lectern, so to speak. Tufte offers an example:

Consider an important and intriguing table of survival rates for those with cancer relative to those without cancer for the same time period. Some 196 numbers and 57 words describe survival rates and their standard errors for 24 cancers. Applying the PowerPoint templates to this nice, straightforward table yields an analytical disaster. (italics added - DS) The data explodes into six separate chaotic slides, consuming 2.9 times the area of the table. Everything is wrong with these smarmy, incoherent graphs: the encoded legends, the meaningless color, the logo-type branding. They are uncomparative, indifferent to content and evidence, and so data-starved as to be almost pointless. Chartjunk is a clear sign of statistical stupidity. Poking a finger into the eye of thought, these data graphics would turn into a nasty travesty if used for a serious purpose, such as helping cancer patients assess their survival chances. To sell a product that messes up data with such systematic intensity, Microsoft abandons any pretense of statistical integrity and reasoning.

If it weren't so expensive I'd go buy a copy of PowerPoint (though Apple's Keynote is 20% of the price and 95% of the functionality, I gather) to see what Tufte is talking about.

But something sounds funny. Can't you place the table in its original form (as Tufte shows it in the article) into PowerPoint directly? Is one forced or even encouraged to place it in the manner shown as the bad examples? Tufte's last sentence is puzzling: "To sell a product that messes up data with such systematic intensity, Microsoft abandons any pretense of statistical integrity and reasoning."

I played with PowerPoint for an afternoon (I never did use it in the presentation) and it seemed simply to be a page layout program for the screen. Just as one can produce a lousy (or great) book with Pagemaker, one can produce, I would think, a lousy (or great) screen presentation with PowerPoint. No? Tufte writes: "Applying the PowerPoint templates to this nice, straightforward table yields an analytical disaster." Is it a requirement to apply and use the PowerPoint templates?

PowerPoint will accept one's own graphics; I imported images and they seemed to work fine. So maybe the problem is simply misuse of a new medium? Of course that is not an inflammatory point for a lecture.

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UPDATE 12/21/03 : See also Crooked Timber: PowerPoint .

Comments

[Scott Chaffin]

Not to put too fine a point on it -- this is a keyspace problem. It exists in the space between the chair and the keys. That's easy for me to say, because I've been using PPT since it's inception. Yes, you can import graphics and no, there is no requirement that you use templates. Or, in this case, Wizards.

Still, quite a funny little article.

[TM Lutas]

As someone who has been paid to create powerpoint presentations in the past, I think I know what Tufte's driving at. Creating a good presentation in powerpoint is as achievable as solving math problems with a printer's cpu. It's eminently doable but you are fighting the machine to do it.

I've read Tufte and he is passionate about usability and good information transmission and , like any crusader, he wants to take us all onto his crusade. So aside from the hyperbole over Stalin, Tufte has a point. Powerpoint is like the crack dealer infested street your kids have to navigate to get to school in the inner city. Sure, you can simply choose not to take the free samples but are the crack dealers of bad presentation techniques embedded in the code of Powerpoint truly blameless?

[David Sucher]

"...you can simply choose not to take the free samples but are the crack dealers of bad presentation techniques embedded in the code of Powerpoint truly blameless?"

hmmm.
fascinating way to put it.

[clew]

I've found that use of Powerpoint is associated with worse lectures by a given speaker, which does point a spectral finger of blame at Powerpoint. PPT may just be the fool called in as distraction when the speaker knows already that the speech is weak.

I can't think of a feature found in PPT and not Word or HTML or Excel that doesn't lend itself to obfuscation more than explanation. I've been avoiding it, though.

In its defense, the David Byrne layout in the current Wired looks pretty; but by his description it wasn't designed to make anything clearer.

[miglia]

I've found myself wondering what it is exactly that makes PPT evil. Certainly it is dangerous: a graphic communications tool in the hands of people poorly trained in graphical communication is a bad thing. As Tufte points out, hierarchical outlines can be used to lend a spurious authority to banal or misleading statements and imply non-existent chains of inference and conclusion. But this, I think, is not enough to make PPT truly evil. For a long time I wondered what I was missing, until I came across this:

[quote]
Leverage your existing presentations so you don’t have to start from scratch. You can import just about any file type into Keynote - including PowerPoint, PDF and AppleWorks presentations - and then enhance with themes. You can paste data from Excel documents into your Keynote charts and tables. Keynote lets you export presentations to PowerPoint, QuickTime or PDF.
[/quote]

Here http://www.apple.com/keynote/ ... and I realised that Chomsky had answered the question over a generation ago.

PPT, surely, has as its antecedents the blackboard, the flip chart and the ohp. Even used amateurishly, all of these media are effectively deployed in communication. Thinking back to my schooldays, I was always worried about teachers who flourished OHPs rather than wrote on the board, for some obscure reason, but they never struck the terror into me that a session of PPTs can. Why is this? And why did ohps make me more nervous than blackboards?

In the 1970s Chomsky noted that television was destroying political discourse. He realised that, in fact, discourse was stopping, as television demanded immediacy, and is not well suited to the delivery of lectures, encouraging a style of discourse now known as the "soundbite". At first, "soundbites" were the distillation of more complex arguments - and this was the point of Chomsky's objection: that complex political debate was being "dumbed down" into a soundbite for television's consumption.

This was the effect of television itself--as McLuhan spotted, the medium is the message--but the political classes soon got with the medium and rather than "dumb down" the argument to get to the soundbite, dropped the argument entirely to produce just the soundbite. By the 1980s, politics had become merely soundbite packaging: Consider, since when did "tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime" actually substitute for a policy on criminal justice?

Although politics has always been about sloganeering--wrapping a complex idea into a memorable phrase like "votes for women", "peace in our time", "liberty, equality, fraternity"--there used to be complex political ideas behind the slogans. Nowadays, political parties don't have policies as such, they instead craft soundbites to appeal to target swing voter groups. The party that does this best gets elected.

There are no longer any big ideas in politics not because all the big idea battles have been won, but because there are not anymore big ideas at all - and PPT has helped this happen to the presentation of complex information.

In the past, the notes on the blackboard represented a summation. The teacher wasn't writing all there was to know on the subject - that existed in books, papers, pictures, documents, films, and other archives. The teacher merely presented a synthetic overview of the corpus relevant to the lesson at hand.

The teacher was able to do this (if they were a good teacher) because they had some mastery of that corpus. The notes on the board were ephemeral, epiphenomena of the narrative the teacher's master caused him/her to weave around the source material. On reflection, this is why I got nervous about OHPs.

OHPs were more difficult to produce, and were produced in advance of the lesson. The teacher became preoccupied with the presentation of the OHPs, making sure they were laid out clearly and legible from the back of the class, as they would be unable to effect significant changes on the fly. They would have to prejudge very accurately the length of their talk, and the level of engagement of their audience. They would, in short, have come to see the production of the OHPs as the end in itself, rather than the summative mastery of the subject matter.

PPTs, too, has become an end in itself. PPTs don't summarise more complex corpora, they are the sole embodiment of a piece of thinking, information or ideas. The are lavishly prepared: my anecdotal impression is that for every hour a PPT is worked on, 40 minutes are on looknfeel, and 20 minutes are on content.

As more and more visual tools are loaded into presentation software, as with Keynote, more and more time is spent on the looknfeel. This is what makes PPT evil: it is the primary medium for the expression of ideas in business, and, increasingly, education.

PPT is no longer an ephemeral medium, but a medium of record - so what we record is executive summaries and bullet-points. Not only are complex ideas no longer explored --if they won't fit on a slide, there's no place for them--but people are becoming increasingly ignorant of complex ideas: All thought has become slogans.

Is there hope? Very little, I fear. But I say this - delete your PPT slides after presenting them. Promise yourself that you will always treat them as ephemeral, that your primary sources will be elsewhere, in greater depth, and with more detail, and you may yet be saved.