How Powerpoint makes you stupid - Franck Frommer

Summary

• Full title: How PowerPoint Makes You Stupid: The Faulty Causality, Sloppy Logic, Decontextualized Data, and Seductive Showmanship That Have Taken Over Our Thinking - Franck Frommer
• Mr Frommer really hates powerpoint and goes about trying to prove it. I agree with many of the things he says, but not all of it, and I am not sure that we can pin the generally dumbing down of everything on only one product. But he definitely gives me food for thought.

How I discovered it

• I have no idea!

How the book changed me

• I may not agree with everything he said, but I want to try and beware the tendency to reduce everything to simplified cliches

Details

• An essay by Edward Tufte 'The cognitive style of powerpoint' laid out an analysis of powerpoints role in the Columbia space shuttle diaster. He illustrates the way that powerpoing style of presentation hides imporant information that could have revealed flaws or sounded an alarm.
• some characteristics of powerpoint thinking:
  • Foreshortening of evidence and thought
  • low spatial resolution
  • an intensely hierarchical single path structure
  • breaking up data into slides and fragments
  • chartjunk and fluff
  • preoccupation with format and not content
  • poor graphic design
  • information turned into a sales pitch
• Collective work, debate, deep thinking and the exchange of ideas does not lend itself to the powerpoint style of presentation.
• Describing the world by means of lists is an illusion that we have mastered the world and fully understand the situation. They may create the appearance of having thought everything out fully.
• Powerpoint style presentations may demonstrate correlation without proving cause and effect between the things described.
• Microsoft may have been influenced by Conways law when they designed Powerpoint
• Powerpoint slides requires omissoin of connective terms which normally would be used in a sentence. This may leave the meaning open to interpretation.
• A presentation may have sentences without subjects, no connectors. Only the speaker can make it clearer, but sometimes the speaker merely repeats the statements in teh presentaion.
• I dont quite understand this one 100%, but it seems interesting enough to pursue at some point: Relevance theory
• What is important in a presentation? The speaker is the source of information not the visual aids

Quotes

• "PowerPoint makes us stupid.” This is what Marine General James N. Mattis declared at a military conference (in a speech given without PowerPoint) in North Carolina in April 2010.
• "PowerPoint’s convenience for some presenters is costly to the content and the audience. These costs arise from the cognitive style characteristic of the standard default PP presentation: foreshortening of evidence and thought, low spatial resolution, an intensely hierarchical single-path structure as the model for organizing every type of content, breaking up narratives and data into slides and minimal fragments, rapid temporal sequencing of thin information rather than focused spatial analysis, conspicuous chartjunk and PP Phluff, branding of slides with logotypes, a preoccupation with format not content, incompetent design for data graphics and tables, and a smirky commercialism that turns information into a sales pitch and presenters into marketeers"
• General H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led efforts to secure the Iraqi city Tal Afar in 2005, told Elisabeth Bumiller of the New York Times, “[PowerPoint is] dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control. Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.”12 He was especially critical of bulleted lists, PowerPoint’s real danger, because they take no account of the complex relations among political, economic, and ethnic forces. In the view of all these generals, the software program stifles discussion, critical thinking, and reasoned decision making. But they have watched anxiously and powerlessly as the bulk of the work of many officers has turned into the making of slides
• Information can be a distraction - Barack Obama

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