Why PowerPoint Is The Enemy of Coherence
"Boredom is the word most often associated with Microsoft PowerPoint."[3] The military jargon, 'hypnotizing chickens' has entered the urban dictionary as meaning, "The process of developing PowerPoint slides and other media that will induce coma in the audience."[4]
Can you remember being in a lecture dominated by the use of Microsoft's Powerpoint that was exciting because of its eloquent delivery of relevant information? No? Me neither. Either it's a boring list of fragmentary sentences or the presenter had became so enamored with the bells and whistles of PowerPoint that it's confusing and confounding. Both examples are unmemorable to the listener. Transitioning effects between slides is a weak attempt not to bore the audience to death and ends up pulling attention from the content and towards a guessing game of which transition will be used for the next slide.
Dangerous ignorance is the result of being drowned in a flood of information overflow and wallowing in a sea of incomprehensible connections. Why? Because, "Simplification has nothing to do with organization ... if the designer removes all responsibility for cognitive work from the viewer/user, the designed object ... fails."[5]
Enemy of learning, champion of incoherence, PowerPoint's oxymoron of 'simple complexity' is nonsensical, but how does one communicate complex data simply? How to overcome death by PowerPoint and conquer senselessness? One suggestion for a better Powerpoint demonstration is to have a question and answer session after the lecture. Perhaps there should be questioning during the delivery.
One person may pick up on a point and write it down to ask after the address, but others may not remember the particular bullet point and slide that is being referred to 20 minutes later. By becoming interactive participators instead of bored spectators, an engaged audience in cognitive thought may avoid the hypnotized chicken syndrome. Wouldn't the time be better spent if simply distributed the PowerPoint beforehand and used the entire meeting time in a informal question and answer conversation?
Unknown unknowns, fragmented cells that independently grow haphazardly is difficult to wrap one's head around into a gestalt of a single cancer. The outer fringes of information are not disseminated throughout the entire organization from a central top-down pyramid structure of an national army. A dispersed authority that enables solders with direct knowledge of the immediate situation relies on speed of information, not waiting for the dinosaur response time of the upper chain of command.
In the book, "Program theory-driven evaluation science: strategies and applications" by Steward Ian Donaldson, he wrote that the number one need is that the engagement of direct users of information is needed to be part of the collaborative effect towards evaluation of strategies. In the book, "The Development of Theory-Driven Evaluation in the Military, Theory on the Front Line", the author's conclusion is that, "A cross-pollination of ideas between military and civilian evaluators is urgently needed to improve the quality and effectiveness of military evaluation"[6]
References:
[1] Elisabeth Bumiller, "We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint" The New York Times 4.26.2010
[2] bramalingam, "Powerpoint, Complexity and the Art of Hypnotizing Chickens" aidontheedge.info 4.27.2010
[3] Tad Simons, "Does PowerPoint Make You Stupid?" sociablemedia.com12.15.2004
[4] Four Iron Feet, "Hypnotizing Chickens " urbandictionary 4.27.2010
[5] Andy Rutledge, "Complex Order, Simple Chaos" andyrutledge.com1.2.2009
[6] Andrew P. Williams, "The Development of Theory-Driven Evaluation in the Military, Theory on the Front Line" 5.5.2010
Published by ptosis
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