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December 17, 2003
"Powerpoint Makes You Dumb": My essay in the New York Times Magazine
This week, I contributed five short essays to the New York Times Magazine's annual "Year in Ideas" issue. I've posted them all below, one by one.
Of the ones I wrote, however, this first one seems to have have been the biggest hit. <BEGIN EGREGIOUS BOASTING> Apparently, this piece on Powerpoint has been on the Top 10 of the most-forwarded stories from the entire New York Times archive in the last four days since it was published -- including, good lord, the day that Saddam Hussein was caught, which you figure was a pretty busy news day. Nonetheless, this piece was at #3 yesterday, and started today at #5 before climbing back up to #3. </END EGREGIOUS BOASTING> The story gets taken off the New York Times archive this coming Saturday, so it'll vanish from the Top-10 list then too.
Still, that's an interesting index of how fraught PowerPoint must be in the corporate world. Probably, many users have suspected precisely what Edward Tufte is quoted as saying: That PowerPoint is a medium that directly shapes -- and degrades -- its message. Somewhere, Marshall McLuhan is smiling.
PowerPoint Makes You Dumb
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 Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.
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
Posted by Clive Thompson at December 17, 2003 02:41 PM
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I'm wondering, just wondering if the point of your essay might have been rendered clearer in Powerpoint. Perhaps your NYT essay was truncated somehow, but on your site, it is completely logically unsound. Your logic flow goes as follows (correct me if I've overlooked something):
1. Nasa senior management suspects that using Powerpoint contributes to poor information flow, and ultimately, the death of astronauts.
2. Edward Tufte things that PowerPoint is not analytical enough because it doesn't allow for enough facts on a page.
3. Microsoft says you can put a lot of facts on a page if you want.
3a. Oh, and Col. Powell uses it too.
4. PowerPoint thus helps you obsfucate.
You are trying to convince your reader that Powerpoint is bad, because one organization's managers feel that its people cram too much data in its presentations to be understood clearly. Yet you support this thesis with 'evidence' from a data-junkie who says ppt does not allow for sufficient information to be crammed in, and thus is a flawed analytical tool. Then you weakly attempt to acknowledge resistance by citing the vendor of this product, who says ppt is ok--but who would trust them?
Amazingly, you somehow think that this tautology will wash because you've cited two credible sources. Yet--speaking of obfuscation--you neglected in your slim essay to mention the fact that your first source--Nasa--is practically the foundation reference of Tufte's argument in HIS damnation of PowerPoint, and if Nasa is slapping down ppt, it is likely because Tufte brought the space agency's inept usage of the medium to light by butchering Nasa's post-Columbia-blow-up post-mortem presentation in his slim volume. It was horrible, no doubt, but the point here is that you've neatly appropriated Tufte's source, and claimed two sources instead of one. A little risque, don't you think, not to properly acknowledge the links in your sources in an essay for the post-Jayson Blair, post-LA Rivergate New York Times?
Now, let's consider that root source--the Columbia post-blow-up analysis. Tufte--and I've been over his slim volume a half dozen times searching for real insight--criticises the Nasa presenters for a number of faulty analytical techniques, all of which are valid--the 'nesting' of points to imitate a logical sequence (much like the division of paragraphs in an NYT essay), the casual usage of statistics. But his biggest beef is the number of data points that you can fit on a page--powerpoint is low resolution, he argues, therefore it can't transmit as much data (I'm with him so far)--and therefore is unable to allow people to analyze information. Whoah; that's a tad of a leap, which he doesn't bother to prove--he just presents a few other examples of charts that pack in more datapoints (many of which are available for sale on his web site, suitable for framing) and claims, bizarrely, that because they had more factiods per square inch, they were inherently superior analytical tools. That is the sum, the grand sum of his argument--and it holds no logical water.
Back to the top of your essay, you've also ever-so-slightly misled your reader into somehow thinking that Nasa is blaming powerpoint on the Comlumbia tragedy. As far as I can tell, the only thing that Nasa--and Tufte--are critizing the space agency's brainiacs for failure to accurately present the implications of their findings--and (in the receipient's case) for failure to discern these implications. That the nation's top scientists should be unable to parse a slideshow is a bit concerning, but where is the evidence that it was powerpoint per se, and not sufficiently rigorous testing processes, or sufficiently motivated staff, that allowed such shoddy analysis to pass?
Now, you could easily dismiss my criticism of your illogical piece--which is essentially a rewrite of Tufte's pamphlet, yet you take credit for his thesis-ette in the pride you demonstrate in the numbers of people that have forwarded it around the Internet--by calling me a PowerPoint advocate. Which would be the intellectually sound equivalent of the drooling drunk guy at the end of the bar determining that a woman was a bitch for not wanting to talk to him. I have used Powerpoint to convince clients to take decisive action to solve busines problems, and to present research-driven implications for university students in lectures. I've also used whiteboards, cocktail napkins, my hands, and two hundred page reports. Regardless of my medium, my message is always based on a core of irrefutable facts, and a presentation of of arguments built in logical sequence. Your name check of McLuhan suggests that you do what most lazy researchers do when they need to drive their paltry arguments towards conclusions--you substitute the 'executive summary' of someone else's message as false evidence that you've done your homework, and hope that these slight, under-analysed references will stand in for a logical backbone in the argument. As you've clearly demonstrated in your poorly constructed piece, Powerpoint is not the only medium to transmit lightweight pseudo-analysis--and it certainly isn't the root cause of failure to think critically.
Posted by: Ross O'Brien at December 19, 2003 12:44 PM
Hey Clive, great article, and congrats on its success!
To me this is one of those cases where you have to understand how best to use the tool at hand. You can hurt people with cars but nobody doubts their value.
So in that spirit my humble suggestions are posted here.
Posted by: barry at December 19, 2003 6:27 PM
Barry -- those are really good suggestions! I quite agree with the idea of keeping the PPT slides simple, to use them to summarize the main point that you're delivering with your voice.
Ross: You're quite right that my extremely-short essay wasn't a terribly rigorous piece of logic -- it was, after all, a barely-400-words-long version of a 28-page argument by Tufte that, indeed, could easily have been an entire book if he wanted to really stretch his point out. So in that sense, my tiny essay was itself rather like a piece of PowerPoint -- a highly concise compression of a very complex and nuanced topic.
Good point also that Tufte, in his pamphlet, doesn't explain at great length *why* he thinks one needs enormous amounts of data to make a point. Obviously, many times you don't, in which case the low-resolution limits of PowerPoint are not a problem. I think Tufte was -- perhaps unfortunately -- assuming this pamphlet would be read against the existing backdrop of his many books on data presentation; i.e. that this was just a short little update of his ideas, applied to PowerPoint. But if you *only* read his pamphlet, and weren't familiar with his other writings, yes, you're right -- he doesn't do a terribly good job of explaining his assumptions.
Oh, BTW, the fact that NASA used the analysis that Tufte himself presented about PowerPoint? Good lord, dude, that's not even *vaguely* in the Jayson-Blair-class camp of ethical problems. They agreed with his analysis, endorsed it, and presented it as their own. Hell, that sort of remixing and reuse is the basis of academic work.
And whatever else one thinks of Tufte's analysis, three things are incontrovertibly true:
i) The style of a medium affects its message.
ii) PowerPoint is incredibly widely used.
iii) A *surprisingly* large number of people seem to quite viscerally dislike PowerPoint presentations.
One can draw many conclusions from those points. Tufte thinks it means that PowerPoint imposes limitations on data presentation that degrade discussions so much that it frustrates audiences.
One point he made, which I found quite interesting but didn't have time to write about in that short essay, was the PowerPoint has, in effect, *two* audiences: The people who use PowerPoint to create presentations, and the people who have to consume those presentations. The tool, he argues, has been created too much with the former in mind, and not the latter. It's been designed to make it easier for a frazzled mid-level exec to quickly produce a presentation; it exists at least partially to help soothe the anxieties of the presenter. But just make it *easier* to do a presentation doesn't mean the presentation is going to be better. Indeed, it might be worse, because rather than worrying about making the presentation effective, the tool just helps the person feel good because their data "look" good. But really, an exec facing a presentation probably *ought* to be nervous; it's very difficult to accurately present information to a crowd.
Posted by: Clive at December 22, 2003 12:35 PM
I thought your piece was great (though I didn't stop to notice the author's name.). My husband (a UI designer of the most hardcore variety) and I have gifted a few people with Tufte books; it's nice to see someone bringing the message to the masses.
Ross' focus on the amount of data one might display on a page, above, is baffling to me. The fundamental concern of information design is not the amount of data one can display, but the legibility of said data, and the relevance both of the information and the mode of presentation. One need not spew forth seven paragraphs, one of which has 4 numbered items, in order to make one's point. One merely needs to state it clearly - as your essay did.
Posted by: Jessica at December 25, 2003 5:41 PM
Thank yew for the nice comments!
Whatever one believes of Tuftes' essay, I think it's cool that he's sparked a debate about PowerPoint -- one of the most ubiquitous pieces of software on the planet.
Posted by: Clive at December 26, 2003 10:42 PM
Um I think your essay should have focused more on poor presentation or information sharing skills rather than one particular software product. That's what the issue is here : Egg head engineers could not communicate their concern effectively to management.
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Posted by: julia at January 24, 2004 7:06 PM
If anyone has sat through a convention, with every single person using a powerpoint presentation to convey their message, they would know that powerpoint is not a very good medium to learn from. This ill-prepared medium is also making its way into classrooms. It seems that teachers think that taking the examples and/or summaries from a text book and clicking through them in a powerpoint presentation constitutes teaching. I must say, this is tragic. Watching the faces of people peer off into lala land, and judging from test scores afterwards, is proof enough for me that Powerpoint is NOT a viable educational tool. Great, you want to show some people your photo album... use powerpoint. But if you think that using a powerpoint presentation is going to actually help people learn, then you had better have a lot of other suppplies and activities for them as well. Just think how blindly americans (and the rest of the world) watch TV and play video games, addicted to the screen. They are definitely not increasing their intelligence. Has anyone heard of the study that Japan did on two dimensional visual surfaces? (i.e. TV screens) It seems that two dimensional modes of communication yield the human brain to become less able to think critically and make important decisions. Please people, lets not rely on powerpoint for teaching... if for no other reason than the fact that they are not learning.
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I'm wondering, just wondering if the point of your essay might have been rendered clearer in Powerpoint. Perhaps your NYT essay was truncated somehow, but on your site, it is completely logically unsound. Your logic flow goes as follows (correct me if I've overlooked something):
1. Nasa senior management suspects that using Powerpoint contributes to poor information flow, and ultimately, the death of astronauts.
2. Edward Tufte things that PowerPoint is not analytical enough because it doesn't allow for enough facts on a page.
3. Microsoft says you can put a lot of facts on a page if you want.
3a. Oh, and Col. Powell uses it too.
4. PowerPoint thus helps you obsfucate.
You are trying to convince your reader that Powerpoint is bad, because one organization's managers feel that its people cram too much data in its presentations to be understood clearly. Yet you support this thesis with 'evidence' from a data-junkie who says ppt does not allow for sufficient information to be crammed in, and thus is a flawed analytical tool. Then you weakly attempt to acknowledge resistance by citing the vendor of this product, who says ppt is ok--but who would trust them?
Amazingly, you somehow think that this tautology will wash because you've cited two credible sources. Yet--speaking of obfuscation--you neglected in your slim essay to mention the fact that your first source--Nasa--is practically the foundation reference of Tufte's argument in HIS damnation of PowerPoint, and if Nasa is slapping down ppt, it is likely because Tufte brought the space agency's inept usage of the medium to light by butchering Nasa's post-Columbia-blow-up post-mortem presentation in his slim volume. It was horrible, no doubt, but the point here is that you've neatly appropriated Tufte's source, and claimed two sources instead of one. A little risque, don't you think, not to properly acknowledge the links in your sources in an essay for the post-Jayson Blair, post-LA Rivergate New York Times?
Now, let's consider that root source--the Columbia post-blow-up analysis. Tufte--and I've been over his slim volume a half dozen times searching for real insight--criticises the Nasa presenters for a number of faulty analytical techniques, all of which are valid--the 'nesting' of points to imitate a logical sequence (much like the division of paragraphs in an NYT essay), the casual usage of statistics. But his biggest beef is the number of data points that you can fit on a page--powerpoint is low resolution, he argues, therefore it can't transmit as much data (I'm with him so far)--and therefore is unable to allow people to analyze information. Whoah; that's a tad of a leap, which he doesn't bother to prove--he just presents a few other examples of charts that pack in more datapoints (many of which are available for sale on his web site, suitable for framing) and claims, bizarrely, that because they had more factiods per square inch, they were inherently superior analytical tools. That is the sum, the grand sum of his argument--and it holds no logical water.
Back to the top of your essay, you've also ever-so-slightly misled your reader into somehow thinking that Nasa is blaming powerpoint on the Comlumbia tragedy. As far as I can tell, the only thing that Nasa--and Tufte--are critizing the space agency's brainiacs for failure to accurately present the implications of their findings--and (in the receipient's case) for failure to discern these implications. That the nation's top scientists should be unable to parse a slideshow is a bit concerning, but where is the evidence that it was powerpoint per se, and not sufficiently rigorous testing processes, or sufficiently motivated staff, that allowed such shoddy analysis to pass?
Now, you could easily dismiss my criticism of your illogical piece--which is essentially a rewrite of Tufte's pamphlet, yet you take credit for his thesis-ette in the pride you demonstrate in the numbers of people that have forwarded it around the Internet--by calling me a PowerPoint advocate. Which would be the intellectually sound equivalent of the drooling drunk guy at the end of the bar determining that a woman was a bitch for not wanting to talk to him. I have used Powerpoint to convince clients to take decisive action to solve busines problems, and to present research-driven implications for university students in lectures. I've also used whiteboards, cocktail napkins, my hands, and two hundred page reports. Regardless of my medium, my message is always based on a core of irrefutable facts, and a presentation of of arguments built in logical sequence. Your name check of McLuhan suggests that you do what most lazy researchers do when they need to drive their paltry arguments towards conclusions--you substitute the 'executive summary' of someone else's message as false evidence that you've done your homework, and hope that these slight, under-analysed references will stand in for a logical backbone in the argument. As you've clearly demonstrated in your poorly constructed piece, Powerpoint is not the only medium to transmit lightweight pseudo-analysis--and it certainly isn't the root cause of failure to think critically.
Posted by: Ross O'Brien at December 19, 2003 12:44 PM
Hey Clive, great article, and congrats on its success!
To me this is one of those cases where you have to understand how best to use the tool at hand. You can hurt people with cars but nobody doubts their value.
So in that spirit my humble suggestions are posted here.
Posted by: barry at December 19, 2003 6:27 PM
Barry -- those are really good suggestions! I quite agree with the idea of keeping the PPT slides simple, to use them to summarize the main point that you're delivering with your voice.
Ross: You're quite right that my extremely-short essay wasn't a terribly rigorous piece of logic -- it was, after all, a barely-400-words-long version of a 28-page argument by Tufte that, indeed, could easily have been an entire book if he wanted to really stretch his point out. So in that sense, my tiny essay was itself rather like a piece of PowerPoint -- a highly concise compression of a very complex and nuanced topic.
Good point also that Tufte, in his pamphlet, doesn't explain at great length *why* he thinks one needs enormous amounts of data to make a point. Obviously, many times you don't, in which case the low-resolution limits of PowerPoint are not a problem. I think Tufte was -- perhaps unfortunately -- assuming this pamphlet would be read against the existing backdrop of his many books on data presentation; i.e. that this was just a short little update of his ideas, applied to PowerPoint. But if you *only* read his pamphlet, and weren't familiar with his other writings, yes, you're right -- he doesn't do a terribly good job of explaining his assumptions.
Oh, BTW, the fact that NASA used the analysis that Tufte himself presented about PowerPoint? Good lord, dude, that's not even *vaguely* in the Jayson-Blair-class camp of ethical problems. They agreed with his analysis, endorsed it, and presented it as their own. Hell, that sort of remixing and reuse is the basis of academic work.
And whatever else one thinks of Tufte's analysis, three things are incontrovertibly true:
i) The style of a medium affects its message.
ii) PowerPoint is incredibly widely used.
iii) A *surprisingly* large number of people seem to quite viscerally dislike PowerPoint presentations.
One can draw many conclusions from those points. Tufte thinks it means that PowerPoint imposes limitations on data presentation that degrade discussions so much that it frustrates audiences.
One point he made, which I found quite interesting but didn't have time to write about in that short essay, was the PowerPoint has, in effect, *two* audiences: The people who use PowerPoint to create presentations, and the people who have to consume those presentations. The tool, he argues, has been created too much with the former in mind, and not the latter. It's been designed to make it easier for a frazzled mid-level exec to quickly produce a presentation; it exists at least partially to help soothe the anxieties of the presenter. But just make it *easier* to do a presentation doesn't mean the presentation is going to be better. Indeed, it might be worse, because rather than worrying about making the presentation effective, the tool just helps the person feel good because their data "look" good. But really, an exec facing a presentation probably *ought* to be nervous; it's very difficult to accurately present information to a crowd.
Posted by: Clive at December 22, 2003 12:35 PM
I thought your piece was great (though I didn't stop to notice the author's name.). My husband (a UI designer of the most hardcore variety) and I have gifted a few people with Tufte books; it's nice to see someone bringing the message to the masses.
Ross' focus on the amount of data one might display on a page, above, is baffling to me. The fundamental concern of information design is not the amount of data one can display, but the legibility of said data, and the relevance both of the information and the mode of presentation. One need not spew forth seven paragraphs, one of which has 4 numbered items, in order to make one's point. One merely needs to state it clearly - as your essay did.
Posted by: Jessica at December 25, 2003 5:41 PM
Thank yew for the nice comments!
Whatever one believes of Tuftes' essay, I think it's cool that he's sparked a debate about PowerPoint -- one of the most ubiquitous pieces of software on the planet.
Posted by: Clive at December 26, 2003 10:42 PM
Um I think your essay should have focused more on poor presentation or information sharing skills rather than one particular software product. That's what the issue is here : Egg head engineers could not communicate their concern effectively to management.
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Posted by: julia at January 24, 2004 7:06 PM
If anyone has sat through a convention, with every single person using a powerpoint presentation to convey their message, they would know that powerpoint is not a very good medium to learn from. This ill-prepared medium is also making its way into classrooms. It seems that teachers think that taking the examples and/or summaries from a text book and clicking through them in a powerpoint presentation constitutes teaching. I must say, this is tragic. Watching the faces of people peer off into lala land, and judging from test scores afterwards, is proof enough for me that Powerpoint is NOT a viable educational tool. Great, you want to show some people your photo album... use powerpoint. But if you think that using a powerpoint presentation is going to actually help people learn, then you had better have a lot of other suppplies and activities for them as well. Just think how blindly americans (and the rest of the world) watch TV and play video games, addicted to the screen. They are definitely not increasing their intelligence. Has anyone heard of the study that Japan did on two dimensional visual surfaces? (i.e. TV screens) It seems that two dimensional modes of communication yield the human brain to become less able to think critically and make important decisions. Please people, lets not rely on powerpoint for teaching... if for no other reason than the fact that they are not learning.
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