PowerPoint
Makes You Dumb
(New York Times,
In 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
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. -- Clive
Thompson