PowerPoint Makes You Dumb (Full Article)

["Rich de Vecchis" <Rich -dot- deVecchis -at- qaedge -dot- com>]

New York Times Magazine
December 14, 2003
PowerPoint Makes You Dumb
By CLIVE THOMPSON
 
n 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. 

Of course, given that the weapons still haven't been found, maybe Tufte is
onto something. Perhaps PowerPoint is uniquely suited to our modern age of
obfuscation -- where manipulating facts is as important as presenting them
clearly. If you have nothing to say, maybe you need just the right tool to
help you not say it. 



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