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

[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