Is PowerPoint Making Us Stupid?

This week I started thinking about a long-term assignment in my Evaluation class to write a professional research project proposal which will be presented to the class in an oral presentation.  It's likely that many of us will use PowerPoint in this presentation, which I have no experience with as a presenter, but have experienced extensively as an audience member.  In researching PowerPoint, I came across Edward Tufte's excellent pamphlet "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint", excerpts of which are also available on his website.

Tufte is most widely known for his 1983 book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, in which he critiqued the proliferation of chartjunk, or the extraneous decoration of graphs, and argued that every visual element in a graph should signify data.  In the 2003 pamphlet and a more recent essay on his website Tufte applies this critique to PowerPoint presentations in which only 30-40% of the average slide is devoted to content with the balance belonging to clip art, logos, and other design features.  He argues that PowerPoint presentations tend to suffer from a number of flaws.  For instance, the program encourages presenters to rely on bullet outlines and hierarchical multi-level lists that obscure or only imply the presenter's posited relationship between list items.  Also, the spacial limitations often cause presenters to segregate data and analysis on separate slides rather than side-by-side.  Tufte applies these arguments to a PowerPoint presentation that Boeing gave to NASA concerning the possible damage to the space shuttle Columbia during its final mission, and argues that several common limitations of arguments made via PowerPoint presentation contributed to the official underestimation of the threat of this damage which resulted, unfortunately, in the destruction of the ship and the loss of its crew during re-entry.  This analysis was eventually incorporated into the Columbia Accident Investigation Board's final report with the recommendation that NASA should end its organizational reliance on PowerPoint presentations in favor of technical reports.

Tufte's aims much of his dismay at the institutional sanction of PowerPoint presentations, mentioning, for instance, the PowerPoint policies at the Harvard School of Public Health, which encourage the use of no more than six lines of text per slide with no more than six words per line-- limitations better suited to reading primers, he argues, than scientific analysis.  He contrasts this to a seventeenth century chart of causes of mortality (which includes such colorful causes of death as gout, grief, and plague-in-the-guts) that clearly and efficiently organizes twenty years' worth of deaths on a single page.

Ultimately, the thrust of the essay is that businesses and academic institutions are adjusting their presentations to suit the limitations of the presentation technology rather than adjusting the technology to suit their presentation needs.  PowerPoint was conceived for the convenience of presenters and at a huge expense to the content and to the audience of the presentation.

I'm glad to have read this essay in time to think about alternative means of presenting my research proposal.  I was thinking I'd I'd want counter the ubiquity of PowerPoint with something more original anyway-- now I have a justification for that decision.