When Microsoft first released PowerPoint in 1990, I’m not sure that even they could have imagined its stratospheric success. But 25 years on, some pundits argue that this once mighty presentation tool has been so over used and abused that they believe it’s making us all stupid…
Firstly let’s get something straight, the problem here is not the software but the users themselves – it is the driver, not the vehicle. We’ve all seen examples of it, right? The attempts to write a ‘book’ about the subject matter (the average PowerPoint chart has 40 words on it) using the smallest typeface possible (to fit in even more text) and (for no apparent reason) punctuating every single sentence with a bullet point…
And equally, despite writing their magnum opus, users appear to entirely lose the ability to actually tell a cohesive story (which prior to putting their thoughts into a template had been completely lucid).
I recall one such conversation with a colleague several years ago who eloquently outlined his (really quite brilliant) thoughts for an upcoming pitch strategy in less than five minutes. I excitedly asked him to replicate that genius into his section of the presentation. A few days later he came back to me with his ‘deck’ and the first thing I noticed as he fired up the projector was that we were on slide 1 of (gulp) 146 charts. My heart sank like the proverbial stone as I immediately knew that he had strangled his thinking the precise moment he had tried to translate it into PowerPoint…
And to compound the horror, he then proceeded to read the entire content, word for (painstaking) word, in a robotic monotone voice. He lost me on chart 2 and never got me back…
A recent article in the Guardian entitled ‘How PowerPoint is killing critical thought’ takes the argument even further. The author of the piece, Andrew Smith, opines that the consequences for both audience and presenter are equally significant, “Bored students is the least of it – the bullet point-isation of information is making us stupid and irresponsible.”
Bullet point-isation? So there you go, that’s a thing. Anyhow, to exemplify his point Smith also cites a book entitled ‘How PowerPoint Makes You Stupid’ (aka The Faulty Causality, Sloppy Logic, Decontextualised Data, and Seductive Showmanship That Have Taken Over Our Thinking) by French writer Franck Frommer. Within the pages of the book (which, I confidently assume, has never been reworked as a PowerPoint) Frommer describes a medium gone awry – a programming design that has merely been a vehicle for the presentation of rhetoric. He argues that PowerPoint ‘de-personalises workplace communication’ – the slideshow has a presenter, but no recognisable author so if no one specifically has written the material, there’s no one specifically to challenge or engage about it.
The facts are, simply, the facts. Presentation is legitimisation and apparently that makes us all stupid as we simply accept what we see / hear without question. Hmm. I’m not sure I quite follow the logic, but maybe all those PowerPoint decks I’ve eagerly given and sometimes (not so) gratefully received has made me a little bit, er, stupid.
So what is the solution? Well Steve Jobs reckoned that ‘picture superiority’ was key. Simple, beautiful images that proverbially speak a thousand words. But what if that isn’t taking it far enough? What alternatives are there? (and I don’t mean another electronic version of PowerPoint like Prezi or Keynote which effectively do the same thing). Well, I ran a regional conference about three years ago and the brief for all the presenters was the same. No PowerPoint. There was some initial grumbling of course but it was amazing to see how resourceful people can be when confronted with this type of hurdle. Some chose to use props (one lady had all her props about ‘mobile’ neatly packed away in her handbag), some chose music, another used his skills as an artist to draw his concepts and someone else used a scroll (now that’s what I call retro thinking). And the really interesting take-out from all these presentations? I can remember each and every one of them. So the question I keep asking myself is, had they used PowerPoint, how many of them could I recall?
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