An article yesterday by AP tech writer Rachel Konrad, cryptically entitled Ex-Talking Head Makes PowerPoint Art, briefly mentions David Byrne's use of PowerPoint as a canvas and his new book, David Byrne: E.E.E.I. (Envisioning Emotional Epistemological Information). But Konrad devotes most of her space to the running debate over the slideware's destructive influence on information sharing.
The article contains a wonderfully acerbic summary of recent criticisms of PowerPoint. The one that inspired my reference to Weapons of Mass Destruction in the title for this post came from Peter Norvig:
"My belief is that PowerPoint doesn't kill meetings. People kill meetings. But using PowerPoint is like having a loaded AK-47 on the table. You can do very bad things with it."
Edward Tufte has been especially critical. In his essay The Cognitive Style of Power Point, he uses slides from the recent space shuttle disaster to demonstrate the consequences of thinking and communicating knowledge in the abbreviated bullet list and low-density graphic style of most PowerPoint presentations.
The relation to KM comes from its core goal of encouraging knowledge workers to share their knowledge. As noted in my earlier post on the problem of gaining and holding attention, KM must concern itself with the design and presentation of knowledge. And effective knowledge sharing requires that individual knowledge workers be skilled in using the digital tools that support collaborative work and wide dissemination of knowledge.
So, the question remains: is PowerPoint so destructive of any but the simplest communication that we should never use it? Tufte might answer yes, but my own pragmatic conclusion is that it is too late to ignore or overthrow PowerPoint. Instead, we must learn to use its strengths and avoid its worst pitfalls. The strengths lie in its ease of use, its ability to combine graphics, audio, and video files with textual content, and its utility as a tool for coreographing a well-prepared live presentation.
The disasters arise from its clumsy tools for auto-generating content, including backgrounds, borders, charts, and graphs. Read Tufte's essay for the details, but the basic conclusion is: don't use them. Ever. Learn to create or import content that actually supports your message, rather than obscuring it.
As I wrote in a recent (as yet unpublished) paper entitled Can Organizational Communication Survive PowerPoint?,
"It has been suggested that the organization’s internal capacity to process information relates directly to its ability to adapt to uncertainty and survive in a changing environment. If so, we should select and use media that allow us the freedom to create useful messages and exchange them efficiently. In light of PowerPoint’s ubiquity (trillions of slides annually!), we should make a determined effort to find out whether, and if so how, it can be made to do the job. If it can, then the effort to redesign our presentation slides should be worthwhile."
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