No-one speaking, no-one listening

[unixronin]

Robert Cringely has another good article on PowerPoint abuse, making the observation that because of the manner in which Powerpoint (intended as a visual aid, not as a means of communication in itself) is misused to become the message instead of aiding the message, with the resulting loss of information because you can only fit so much on a Powerpoint slide, we have largely ceased to communicate without realizing it.  Giving a Powerpoint presentation, we are not speaking, and sitting in the meeting room staring at the presentation, we are not listening.  Between the presenter relying on the slides to serve in place of data, and the audience expecting to derive insight from the slides, little communication is occurring.

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a PowerPoint slide is not, and when we rely on PowerPoint slides instead of actual communication, the author comes out of the meeting room convinced he conveyed his message, and the audience leave convinced that they understood what he meant; and both are wrong.

Comments

[pernishus.livejournal.com]

"I'd hesitate to blame this on PowerPoint -- just count the words on the front pages of newspapers over the past hundred years -- and perhaps the average number of syllables. Striking a ratio of paratactic versus hypotactic sentences might also be revealing...", remarks Pernicious the Musquodoboit Harbour Farm Cat's faithful amanuensis and general factotum.

Re:

[felinecanine.livejournal.com]

"I'd hesitate to blame this on PowerPoint"

Well, he doesn't blame it on the tool. He blames the lack of proper communication on the way the tool is used.

slides

[felinecanine.livejournal.com]

I think next time I have to do a presentation (which might be never, who
knows), I'll use handwritten slides. My belief is that too much time
is spent on making presentations that look attractive and not enough
time is spent on the content of the presentations itself.

PowerPoint or other visual aids are useful in presentations if they
are properly used. However, visual aids that have too much information and
slides that encourage the audience to read them are too distracting to be
used in presentations.

I liked Cringley's article on the PowerPoint abuse. I only wish he
hadn't wandered into the e-mail topic at the end of it. It's not that
I disagree with him there, but he seemed to jam that thought into
the end of the article where he didn't have time to properly expand on
it.

[elegantelbow.livejournal.com]

This reminds me of attutle's evil twin brother. He came over with an assignment from one of his MIS classes. The assignment was a detailed description of a company, and the goal was to tell them what computers they needed, where they could buy them, and how much it was going to cost. Finally, the student was to write a PowerPoint presentation to give to the client.

But, the evil twin said (over and over), "it's just a PowerPoint Presentation." He couldn't get past the software to see that there was actual meat to the assignment

Re:

[ilcylic.livejournal.com]

Or maybe he understood it better than all of us, seeing that the medium would be sufficiently obscuring of the message, such the the content didn't matter.

No, that sort of deep philosophical thought would be way past C.

-Ogre