The new media know-how was going to make us silly, to cut back all human interplay to a gross sales pitch. It was going to corrode our minds, degrade communication, and waste our time. Its sudden rise and fast unfold via enterprise, authorities, and schooling augured nothing lower than “the top of purpose,” as one well-known artist put it, for higher or for worse. In the long run, it could even get blamed for the live-broadcast deaths of seven People on nationwide tv. The yr was 2003, and People had been freaking out in regards to the world-altering dangers of … Microsoft PowerPoint.
Socrates as soon as warned that the written phrase would atrophy our reminiscence; the Renaissance polymath Conrad Gessner cautioned that the printing press would drown us in a “complicated and dangerous abundance of books.” Generations since have frightened that different new applied sciences—radio, TV, video video games—would rot our kids’s brains. In simply the previous 15 years alone, this journal has sounded the alarm on Google, smartphones, and social media. A few of these critiques appear to have aged fairly effectively; others, not so effectively. However tucked amongst them was a techno-scare of the very best order that has now been nearly solely forgotten: the assumption that PowerPoint—that the majority enervating member of the Workplace software program suite, that common metonym for soporific conferences—is perhaps evil.
Twenty years later, the Nice PowerPoint Panic reads as each a farce and a tragedy. On the time, the age of social media was dawning: MySpace and LinkedIn had been newly based, and Fb’s launch was simply months away. However even because the polarization machine hummed to life, we had been fixated on the existential risk of bullet factors. Did we merely miss the mark? Or, ridiculous as it might appear right this moment, had been we onto one thing?
Sixteen minutes earlier than landing on the morning of February 1, 2003, the house shuttle Columbia disintegrated into the cloudless East Texas sky. All seven astronauts aboard had been killed. Because the damaged shuttle hurtled towards Earth in items, it appeared to its dwell TV viewers like a swarm of capturing stars.
The instant trigger of the catastrophe, a report from a NASA Accident Investigation Board decided that August, was a chunk of insulating foam that had damaged unfastened and broken the shuttle’s left wing quickly after liftoff. However the report additionally singled out a much less direct, extra stunning perpetrator. Engineers had recognized about—and inappropriately discounted—the wing harm lengthy earlier than Columbia’s tried reentry, however the flaws of their evaluation had been buried in a sequence of arcane and overstuffed computer-presentation slides that had been proven to NASA officers. “It’s simple to grasp how a senior supervisor may learn this PowerPoint slide and never notice that it addresses a life-threatening state of affairs,” the report said, later persevering with: “The Board views the endemic use of PowerPoint briefing slides as an alternative of technical papers as an illustration of the problematic strategies of technical communication at NASA.”
PowerPoint was not then a brand new know-how, however it was newly ubiquitous. In 1987, when this system was first launched, it offered 40,000 copies. Ten years later, it offered 4 million. By the early 2000s, PowerPoint had captured 95 p.c of the presentation-software market, and its rising affect on how People would speak and assume was already giving rise to a critique. A 2001 characteristic in The New Yorker by Ian Parker argued that the software program “helps you make a case, however it additionally makes its personal case: about how you can set up data, how a lot data to arrange, how to have a look at the world.” Vint Cerf, one of many “fathers of the web,” took to quipping that “energy corrupts, and PowerPoint corrupts completely.”
By the beginning of 2003, the phrase dying by PowerPoint had effectively and really entered the favored lexicon. A Yale statistician named Edward Tufte was the primary to take it actually: That spring, Tufte printed a rip-roaring broadside titled The Cognitive Type of PowerPoint, together with his evaluation of the software program’s function within the latest Columbia catastrophe. Its cowl web page, a political cartoon that Tufte designed himself, reveals a photograph of military battalions, standing in excellent columns, earlier than an enormous statue of Joseph Stalin within the heart of Budapest. A speech bubble comes from one soldier’s mouth: “There’s no bullet listing like Stalin’s bullet listing!” One other calls out: “However why learn aloud each slide?” Even Stalin speaks: “следующий слайд,” he says—“Subsequent slide, please.”
The pamphlet’s core argument, channeling Marshall McLuhan, was that the media of communication affect the substance of communication, and PowerPoint as a medium had an obfuscatory, dumbing-down impact. It didn’t essentially create obscure, lazy displays, however it definitely accommodated and generally even disguised them—with doubtlessly deadly penalties. That is precisely what Tufte noticed within the Columbia engineers’ slides. “The cognitive fashion of PP compromised the evaluation,” he declared months earlier than the NASA investigation report reached a really comparable conclusion.
Radical as Tufte’s place was, folks took him severely. He was already well-known on the time as a public mental: His touring one-day class on data design was extra rock tour than lecture circuit. A whole bunch of individuals packed into lodge ballrooms for every session. “They arrive to listen to Edward R. Tufte,” one author remarked on the time, “in the way in which the traditional Greeks will need to have gone to listen to Socrates or would-be transcendentalists reduce a path to nineteenth century Harmony.” So when “the da Vinci of information” determined to weigh in on what would quickly be known as “the PowerPoint debate,” folks listened.
Wired ran an excerpt from his pamphlet in September 2003, beneath the headline “PowerPoint Is Evil.” A couple of months later, The New York Occasions Journal included Tufte’s evaluation—summarized as “PowerPoint Makes You Dumb”—in its recap of the yr’s most intriguing and vital concepts. “Maybe PowerPoint is uniquely suited to our trendy age of obfuscation,” the entry learn, noting that Colin Powell had simply used the software program to current proof of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction to the United Nations.
A couple of pages on was one other notable entry within the journal’s listing of thrilling new concepts: the social community. Whilst PowerPoint was being linked with actuality distortion and the rise of what People would quickly be calling “truthiness,” the jury was nonetheless out on Friendster, LinkedIn, and different such networks. Possibly by supercharging social connection, they might alleviate our “profound nationwide loneliness,” the write-up stated. Possibly they might solely “additional fracture life into disparate spheres—the web and the offline.” Or perhaps they wouldn’t be all that transformative—no less than not in contrast with a know-how as pervasive and influential as PowerPoint.
Tufte is now 81 years outdated and has lengthy since retired. The “E.T. Tour,” which garnered, by his closing rely, 328,001 attendees, is over. Lately, he primarily sculpts. However he’s nonetheless himself: He nonetheless loathes PowerPoint. He nonetheless derives a kindergartner’s delight from calling it “PP.” And in case you go to edwardtufte.com, you’ll be able to nonetheless buy his Stalin cartoon in poster type for $14.
In Could, I emailed Tufte to ask how he thought his critique of PowerPoint had aged. True to type, he answered with a 16-page PDF, compiled specifically for me, consisting of excerpts from his books and a few blurbs about them too. He ultimately agreed to talk by telephone, however my first name to him went to voicemail. “In a land the place time disappeared, E.T. isn’t out there,” he incants in his outgoing message, with movie-trailer dramatics. “Your key to communication is voicemail. Or textual content message. Do it!” Beep.
Once I lastly reached E.T., I requested him whether or not, after 20 years of regular use, PowerPoint had actually made us silly. “I don’t know,” he stated. “I’ve been on one other planet. I’m an artist now.” In some sense, he went on, he’s the worst individual to ask, as a result of nobody has dared present him a PowerPoint presentation since 2003. He additionally claimed that he hasn’t been “holding rating,” however he was conscious—and appreciative—of the semi-recent revelation that his work helped encourage Jeff Bezos to ban the usage of PowerPoint by senior Amazon executives.
Bezos was not the one one to see issues Tufte’s manner. Steve Jobs additionally banned PowerPoint from sure firm conferences. At a 2010 army convention in North Carolina, former Nationwide Safety Adviser H. R. McMaster, then an Military basic, described PowerPoint as an inside risk; he had prohibited its use throughout the assault on the Iraqi metropolis of Tal Afar in 2005. “PowerPoint makes us silly,” Basic James Mattis stated on the identical convention. And in 2011, a former software program engineer in Switzerland shaped the Anti PowerPoint Occasion, a (form of) actual political celebration dedicated to preventing slide-deck tyranny.
Tufte’s essay has confronted its share of criticism too. Some accused him of getting engineered an argument as a way to juice his course attendance. Others stated he’d erred by mixing up the software program with the habits of its customers. “Any basic opposition to PowerPoint is simply dumb,” the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker instructed The Wall Road Journal in 2009. “It’s like denouncing lectures—earlier than there have been terrible PowerPoint displays, there have been terrible scripted lectures, unscripted lectures, slide reveals, chalk talks, and so forth.” Gene Zelazny, the longtime director of enterprise visible displays at McKinsey, summed up Tufte’s argument as “blaming automobiles for the accidents that drivers trigger.”
The issue with this comparability is that our transportation system does bear some accountability for the 30,000 to 40,000 car-crash deaths that happen within the U.S. yearly, as a result of it places drivers within the place to trigger accidents. PowerPoint, Tufte instructed me, has an identical impact by actively facilitating unhealthy displays. “It’s handy for the presenter,” he stated, “and it’s inconvenient and dangerous to the viewers and to the content material.”
But when all of these unhealthy displays actually led to broad societal ills, the proof is tough to seek out. Some scientists have tried to take a formal measure of the alleged PowerPoint Impact, asking whether or not the software program actually influences our capacity to course of data. Sebastian Kernbach, a professor of creativity and design on the College of St. Gallen, in Switzerland, has co-authored a number of opinions synthesizing this literature. On the entire, he instructed me, the analysis means that Tufte was partly proper, partly fallacious. PowerPoint doesn’t appear to make us silly—there isn’t any proof of decrease data retention or generalized cognitive decline, for instance, amongst those that use it—however it does impose a set of assumptions about how data should be conveyed: loosely, in bullet factors, and delivered by presenters to an viewers of passive listeners. These assumptions have even reshaped the bodily atmosphere for the slide-deck age, Kernbach stated: Seminar tables, as soon as configured in a circle, have been bent, post-PowerPoint, right into a U-shape to accommodate presenters.
Once I spoke with Kernbach, he was making ready for a chat on completely different strategies of visible considering to a bunch of staff at a big governmental group. He stated he deliberate to make use of a flip chart, draw on clean slides like a white board, and even perhaps have viewers members do some drawing of their very own. However he was additionally gearing up to make use of common outdated PowerPoint slides. Doing so, he instructed me, would “sign preparation and professionalism” for his viewers. The group was NASA.
The truth that the American house company nonetheless makes use of PowerPoint shouldn’t be stunning. Regardless of the backlash it impressed within the press, and the bile that it raised in billionaires, and the pink alert it brought about inside the army, the corporate-presentation juggernaut rolls on. This system has extra month-to-month customers than ever earlier than, in line with Shawn Villaron, Microsoft’s vp of product for PowerPoint—effectively into the lots of of tens of millions. If something, its use instances have proliferated. Throughout lockdown, folks threw PowerPoint events on Zoom. Children now make PowerPoint displays for his or her dad and mom once they wish to get a pet or give up soccer or attend a Niall Horan meet and greet. If PowerPoint is evil, then evil guidelines the world.
On its face no less than, the concept PowerPoint makes us silly appears to be like like a textbook case of misguided technological doomsaying. Once I requested Tufte to revisit his critique, he demurred, however later in our dialog I pressed him on the matter extra straight: Was it potential that his personal critique of a brand new know-how had missed the goal, simply as so many others had up to now? Have been the concerns over PowerPoint any completely different from these in regards to the printing press or phrase processors or—
He reduce in earlier than I may end the thought. The query, he stated with evident exasperation, was not possible to reply. “I don’t do huge assume, huge bullshit,” he instructed me. “I am down there within the trenches, proper within the act of communication.” By which he meant, I believe, that he doesn’t have interaction in any sort of remotely summary historic considering.
I attempted narrowing the query. At the moment’s considerations about social media bear a sure resemblance to the PowerPoint critique, I stated. Each boil all the way down to a fear that new media applied sciences worth type over substance, that they’re designed to carry our consideration quite than to convey reality, and that they make us silly. Might it’s—was there any likelihood in any respect—that Tufte had made the suitable critique, however of the fallacious know-how? He wasn’t having it. The comparability between PowerPoint and social media, he stated, is “hand-waving and bullshit and opportunism.”
This dismissal however, it’s tempting to entertain counterfactuals and surprise how issues might need performed out if Tufte and the remainder of us had frightened about social media again in 2003 as an alternative of presentation software program. Maybe a well timed pamphlet on The Cognitive Type of Friendster or a Wired headline asserting that “LinkedIn Is Evil” would have modified the course of historical past. If the social-media backlash of the previous few years had been current from the beginning, perhaps Fb would by no means have grown into the behemoth it’s now, and the nation would by no means have develop into so hopelessly divided.
Or it could possibly be that nothing in anyway would have modified. It doesn’t matter what their timing, and no matter their aptness, considerations about new media not often appear to make a distinction. Objections get steamrolled. The brand new know-how takes over. And years later, after we look again and assume, How unusual that we had been so perturbed, the results of that know-how could be invisible.
Did the written phrase decimate our reminiscence? Did radio shrink our consideration span? Did PowerPoint flip us into company bureaucrats? If these improvements actually did change the way in which we predict, then we’re measuring their results with an altered thoughts. Both the critiques had been fallacious, or they had been so proper that we will not inform the distinction.
