The new media know-how was going to make us silly, to scale back all human interplay to a gross sales pitch. It was going to corrode our minds, degrade communication, and waste our time. Its sudden rise and fast unfold by means of enterprise, authorities, and schooling augured nothing lower than “the end of reason,” as one well-known artist put it, for higher or for worse. In the tip, it could even get blamed for the live-broadcast deaths of seven Americans on nationwide tv. The 12 months was 2003, and Americans had been freaking out concerning the world-altering dangers of … Microsoft PowerPoint.
Socrates as soon as warned that the written phrase would atrophy our reminiscence; the Renaissance polymath Conrad Gessner cautioned that the printing press would drown us in a “confusing and harmful abundance of books.” Generations since have nervous that different new applied sciences—radio, TV, video video games—would rot our kids’s brains. In simply the previous 15 years alone, this journal has sounded the alarm on Google, smartphones, and social media. Some of those critiques appear to have aged fairly nicely; others, not so nicely. But tucked amongst them was a techno-scare of the best order that has now been virtually completely forgotten: the assumption that PowerPoint—that almost all enervating member of the Office software program suite, that common metonym for soporific conferences—could be evil.
Twenty years later, the Great PowerPoint Panic reads as each a farce and a tragedy. At the time, the age of social media was dawning: MySpace and LinkedIn had been newly based, and Facebook’s launch was simply months away. But even because the polarization machine hummed to life, we had been fixated on the existential risk of bullet factors. Did we merely miss the mark? Or, ridiculous as it could appear at the moment, had been we onto one thing?
Sixteen minutes earlier than landing on the morning of February 1, 2003, the area shuttle Columbia disintegrated into the cloudless East Texas sky. All seven astronauts aboard had been killed. As the damaged shuttle hurtled towards Earth in items, it regarded to its reside TV viewers like a swarm of taking pictures stars.
The instant trigger of the catastrophe, a report from a NASA Accident Investigation Board decided that August, was a bit of insulating foam that had damaged unfastened and broken the shuttle’s left wing quickly after liftoff. But the report additionally singled out a much less direct, extra shocking perpetrator. Engineers had recognized about—and inappropriately discounted—the wing harm lengthy earlier than Columbia’s tried reentry, however the flaws of their evaluation had been buried in a collection of arcane and overstuffed computer-presentation slides that had been proven to NASA officers. “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 report acknowledged, later persevering with: “The Board views the endemic use of PowerPoint briefing slides instead of technical papers as an illustration of the problematic methods of technical communication at NASA.”
PowerPoint was not then a brand new know-how, nevertheless it was newly ubiquitous. In 1987, when this system was first launched, it bought 40,000 copies. Ten years later, it bought 4 million. By the early 2000s, PowerPoint had captured 95 p.c of the presentation-software market, and its rising affect on how Americans would speak and suppose was already giving rise to a critique. A 2001 function in The New Yorker by Ian Parker argued that the software program “helps you make a case, but it also makes its own case: about how to organize information, how much information to organize, how to look at the world.” Vint Cerf, one of many “fathers of the internet,” took to quipping that “power corrupts, and PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.”
By the beginning of 2003, the phrase loss of life by PowerPoint had nicely and actually entered the favored lexicon. A Yale statistician named Edward Tufte was the primary to take it actually: That spring, Tufte printed a rip-roaring broadside titled The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, together with his evaluation of the software program’s position within the latest Columbia catastrophe. Its cowl web page, a political cartoon that Tufte designed himself, reveals a photograph of military battalions, standing in good columns, earlier than a large statue of Joseph Stalin within the middle of Budapest. A speech bubble comes from one soldier’s mouth: “There’s no bullet list like Stalin’s bullet list!” Another calls out: “But why read aloud every slide?” Even Stalin speaks: “следующий слайд,” he says—“Next slide, please.”
The pamphlet’s core argument, channeling Marshall McLuhan, was that the media of communication affect the substance of communication, and PowerPoint as a medium had an obfuscatory, dumbing-down impact. It didn’t essentially create imprecise, lazy displays, nevertheless it actually accommodated and typically even disguised them—with doubtlessly deadly penalties. This is precisely what Tufte noticed within the Columbia engineers’ slides. “The cognitive style of PP compromised the analysis,” he declared months earlier than the NASA investigation report reached a really comparable conclusion.
Radical as Tufte’s place was, folks took him critically. He was already well-known on the time as a public mental: His touring one-day class on data design was extra rock tour than lecture circuit. Hundreds of individuals packed into lodge ballrooms for every session. “They come to hear Edward R. Tufte,” one author remarked on the time, “in the way the ancient Greeks must have gone to hear Socrates or would-be transcendentalists cut a path to 19th century Concord.” So when “the da Vinci of data” determined to weigh in on what would quickly be referred to as “the PowerPoint debate,” folks listened.
Wired ran an excerpt from his pamphlet in September 2003, beneath the headline “PowerPoint Is Evil.” Just a few months later, The New York Times Magazine included Tufte’s evaluation—summarized as “PowerPoint Makes You Dumb”—in its recap of the 12 months’s most intriguing and essential concepts. “Perhaps PowerPoint is uniquely suited to our modern age of obfuscation,” the entry learn, noting that Colin Powell had simply used the software program to current proof of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction to the United Nations.
Just a few pages on was one other notable entry within the journal’s checklist of thrilling new concepts: the social community. Even as PowerPoint was being linked with actuality distortion and the rise of what Americans would quickly be calling “truthiness,” the jury was nonetheless out on Friendster, LinkedIn, and different such networks. Maybe by supercharging social connection, they might alleviate our “profound national loneliness,” the write-up stated. Maybe they’d solely “further fracture life into disparate spheres—the online and the offline.” Or possibly they wouldn’t be all that transformative—a minimum of not in contrast with a know-how as pervasive and influential as PowerPoint.
Tufte is now 81 years previous and has lengthy since retired. The “E.T. Tour,” which garnered, by his ultimate depend, 328,001 attendees, is over. These days, he primarily sculpts. But he’s nonetheless himself: He nonetheless loathes PowerPoint. He nonetheless derives a kindergartner’s delight from calling it “PP.” And for those who go to edwardtufte.com, you’ll be able to nonetheless buy his Stalin cartoon in poster type for $14.
In May, I emailed Tufte to ask how he thought his critique of PowerPoint had aged. True to type, he answered with a 16-page PDF, compiled specifically for me, consisting of excerpts from his books and a few blurbs about them too. He ultimately agreed to talk by telephone, however my first name to him went to voicemail. “In a land where time disappeared, E.T. is not available,” he incants in his outgoing message, with movie-trailer dramatics. “Your key to communication is voicemail. Or text message. Do it!” Beep.
When I lastly reached E.T., I requested him whether or not, after 20 years of regular use, PowerPoint had actually made us silly. “I have no idea,” he stated. “I’ve been on another planet. I’m an artist now.” In some sense, he went on, he’s the worst particular person to ask, as a result of nobody has dared present him a PowerPoint presentation since 2003. He additionally claimed that he hasn’t been “keeping score,” however he was conscious—and appreciative—of the semi-recent revelation that his work helped encourage Jeff Bezos to ban the usage of PowerPoint by senior Amazon executives.
Bezos was not the one one to see issues Tufte’s approach. Steve Jobs additionally banned PowerPoint from sure firm conferences. At a 2010 navy convention in North Carolina, former National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster, then an Army common, described PowerPoint as an inner risk; he had prohibited its use through the assault on the Iraqi metropolis of Tal Afar in 2005. “PowerPoint makes us stupid,” General James Mattis stated on the similar convention. And in 2011, a former software program engineer in Switzerland shaped the Anti PowerPoint Party, a (form of) actual political celebration dedicated to combating slide-deck tyranny.
Tufte’s essay has confronted its share of criticism too. Some accused him of getting engineered an argument to be able to juice his course attendance. Others stated he’d erred by mixing up the software program with the habits of its customers. “Any general opposition to PowerPoint is just dumb,” the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker instructed The Wall Street Journal in 2009. “It’s like denouncing lectures—before there were awful PowerPoint presentations, there were awful scripted lectures, unscripted lectures, slide shows, chalk talks, and so on.” Gene Zelazny, the longtime director of enterprise visible displays at McKinsey, summed up Tufte’s argument as “blaming cars for the accidents that drivers cause.”
The downside with this comparability is that our transportation system does bear some duty for the 30,000 to 40,000 car-crash deaths that happen within the U.S. yearly, as a result of it places drivers within the place to trigger accidents. PowerPoint, Tufte instructed me, has a similar impact by actively facilitating dangerous displays. “It’s convenient for the presenter,” he stated, “and it’s inconvenient and harmful to the audience and to the content.”
But if all of these dangerous displays actually led to broad societal ills, the proof is difficult to search out. Some scientists have tried to take a formal measure of the alleged PowerPoint Effect, asking whether or not the software program actually influences our skill to course of data. Sebastian Kernbach, a professor of creativity and design on the University of St. Gallen, in Switzerland, has co-authored a number of opinions synthesizing this literature. On the entire, he instructed me, the analysis means that Tufte was partly proper, partly flawed. PowerPoint doesn’t appear to make us silly—there is no such thing as a proof of decrease data retention or generalized cognitive decline, for instance, amongst those that use it—nevertheless it does impose a set of assumptions about how data should be conveyed: loosely, in bullet factors, and delivered by presenters to an viewers of passive listeners. These assumptions have even reshaped the bodily surroundings for the slide-deck age, Kernbach stated: Seminar tables, as soon as configured in a circle, have been bent, post-PowerPoint, right into a U-shape to accommodate presenters.
When I spoke with Kernbach, he was making ready for a chat on totally different strategies of visible considering to a gaggle of staff at a big governmental group. He stated he deliberate to make use of a flip chart, draw on clean slides like a white board, and maybe even have viewers members do some drawing of their very own. But he was additionally gearing up to make use of common previous PowerPoint slides. Doing so, he instructed me, would “signal preparation and professionalism” for his viewers. The group was NASA.
The incontrovertible fact that the American area company nonetheless makes use of PowerPoint shouldn’t be shocking. Despite the backlash it impressed within the press, and the bile that it raised in billionaires, and the pink alert it precipitated inside the navy, the corporate-presentation juggernaut rolls on. The program has extra month-to-month customers than ever earlier than, in keeping with Shawn Villaron, Microsoft’s vp of product for PowerPoint—nicely into the lots of of tens of millions. If something, its use instances have proliferated. During lockdown, folks threw PowerPoint events on Zoom. Kids now make PowerPoint displays for his or her mother and father once they wish to get a pet or give up soccer or attend a Niall Horan meet and greet. If PowerPoint is evil, then evil guidelines the world.
On its face a minimum of, the concept that PowerPoint makes us silly seems to be like a textbook case of misguided technological doomsaying. When I requested Tufte to revisit his critique, he demurred, however later in our dialog I pressed him on the matter extra straight: Was it doable that his personal critique of a brand new know-how had missed the goal, simply as so many others had up to now? Were the concerns over PowerPoint any totally different from these concerning the printing press or phrase processors or—
He reduce in earlier than I might end the thought. The query, he stated with evident exasperation, was unattainable to reply. “I don’t do big think, big bullshit,” he instructed me. “I’m down there in the trenches, right in the act of communication.” By which he meant, I believe, that he doesn’t have interaction in any form of remotely summary historic considering.
I attempted narrowing the query. Today’s issues about social media bear a sure resemblance to the PowerPoint critique, I stated. Both boil all the way down to a fear that new media applied sciences worth type over substance, that they’re designed to carry our consideration relatively than to convey reality, and that they make us silly. Could it’s—was there any probability in any respect—that Tufte had made the appropriate critique, however of the flawed know-how? He wasn’t having it. The comparability between PowerPoint and social media, he stated, is “hand-waving and bullshit and opportunism.”
This dismissal however, it’s tempting to entertain counterfactuals and marvel how issues may need performed out if Tufte and the remainder of us had nervous about social media again in 2003 as a substitute of presentation software program. Perhaps a well timed pamphlet on The Cognitive Style of Friendster or a Wired headline asserting that “LinkedIn Is Evil” would have modified the course of historical past. If the social-media backlash of the previous few years had been current from the beginning, possibly Facebook would by no means have grown into the behemoth it’s now, and the nation would by no means have grow to be so hopelessly divided.
Or it may very well be that nothing by any means would have modified. No matter what their timing, and no matter their aptness, issues about new media not often appear to make a distinction. Objections get steamrolled. The new know-how takes over. And years later, after we look again and suppose, How unusual that we had been so perturbed, the results of that know-how might be invisible.
Did the written phrase decimate our reminiscence? Did radio shrink our consideration span? Did PowerPoint flip us into company bureaucrats? If these improvements actually did change the best way we predict, then we’re measuring their results with an altered thoughts. Either the critiques had been flawed, or they had been so proper that we are able to not inform the distinction.