19 October 2004

Microsoft PowerPoint and the decline of civilization

I heard this and jotted down some points while listening. It is a must-think-about. Pasting the points (hee hee):

Microsoft Powerpoint symbolises the ...

urge to summarise, reduce and truncate
eternal standoff between content and form

Everything becomes a sales pitch
Info has to be uniformly accessible
Forced simplicty; reduces your capacity to think, to communicate
Info presented thus tends to be soft, woolly
Every slide would be like reading a brochure
Parents love it, because they think that the children are learning something new. Teachers love it because parents love it because children love it.
It makes points, not conversation. It is for a corporate setting; merchandising.
It represents the controlling tendencey in contemporary life.
Simplify, Reduce, Oversimplify.

Critics say it is...
a crash course in stupidity
death by a thousand bullet points.

If you read this, please go and listen to it. The Gettysburg PowerPoint Presentation says it all, of course.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

Me too. I am sick of making/attending 'pointed' and 'brief'presentations.
"Everything becomes a sales pitch" - Very true

What I want to do is talk, walk to and fro between the blackboard and audience, draw a figure on the board with chalk and make my hand messy, get chalkpowder on my shirt.. these are the things that make talks and presentations satisfying!!!
powerpoint presentations curtail the human touch in expanding knowledge.

Ubermensch said...

lovely blog, nice to find some dissonance here n there... absolutely agree with ya sham .... long gone days, where u try to communicate and get across and not sell , uff ah hurts like hell

Vijayalaxmi Hegde said...

Hey ubermensch
You will find a lot of dissonance here, whenever i have the time to dissent, that is.