Week 6 - The Digitally Assisted Presentation - “See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.”
I really enjoyed this week’s article by Edward Tufte. His tone was perfect for PowerPoint. You really can’t speak too glowingly of PowerPoint. It can be helpful but it essentially an unlovable thing. It has caused far too much suffering in the world. Tufte says it well on p. 5 of his article as he notes that PowerPoint templates show 10% to 20% of the information generally found in routine news graphics. He argues that the appropriate response to such “vacuous displays” is for audience members to speak out: “It’s more complicated than that!” “Why are we having this meeting? The rate of information transfer is asymptotically approaching zero.” He’s exactly right, I think we would all gain a lot more from most PowerPoint presentations if this kind of exchange did occur and then maybe people could reconnect with real information and make the meeting worthwhile. But, as he later argues, PowerPoint presentations are not about meaningful or worthwhile exchange. Rather, “PowerPoint allows speakers to pretend that they are giving a real takl, and audiences to pretend that they are listening” (p. 25).
Tufte also shows Peter Norvig’s PowerPoint presentation of the Gettysburg address. Not only was this quite funny, but also helped demonstrate how great content is dumbed down by the PowerPoint format.
In his final section he talks about how to improve our presentations and basically says that we should use paper handouts and avoid PowerPoint altogether. I’m not sure I fully agree as I do think PowerPoint can accomplish one or two good things. It allows you to integrate images (real historical ones that is, not clipart) into your presentation and give citation material for those images as well. Basically I think this is one of the few good things that PowerPoint can do. I would think that there are probably times (especially in teaching large history survey courses) when you would like to incorporate historical images. I think the easiest place to find them is on the internet and thus PowerPoint basically allows us to quickly show them in a potentially non-distracting way (as long as we don’t fill up the rest of the screen with rubbish clipart or zooming bullet points).