mediated history

Ya Powerpoint sucks.  I’ve been in the public school system, and I’ve had to witness first hand the affects of such technology.  Who knew that making use of the Microsoft Office Suite for schools would have such terrible side effects.   Whenever I can, I try to avoid using Powerpoint, not just because I hate it and it makes everything boring, but it’s only positive contribution is improving mediocre presentations by trying to fool the audience into thinking that making the Powerpoint would take more time and energy then it really does.

In the Wired article, they highlight some of the main problems with Powerpoint, which is how people interact with the technology and how ingrained the tool is within western business culture.  When people use Powerpoint, things become dehumanized, stale, and the information displayed has to be top notch if you want to effectively convey the proper ideas with quantitative data.  I think that infographs will eventually fall into this realm too, they do a good job at highlighting data but they are very weak at giving in depth, specific data.  Good speech and compelling imagery are so effective by themselves, and somehow we are bad at showing both of them at the same time.

Abe Lincoln’s Powerpoint was pretty funny.  I can imagine everyone being bored out of their minds watching Abe try to fix the display settings, or maybe Abe getting angry because he was using Mac Fonts and they got all messed up when playing it from another computer.  Powerpoint is a technology that takes away meaning from information which is really bad.  Google please fix.

~ by aledere1 on November 5, 2012 .