Rising Above the Over Quantification of Content: Part Three: Powerpoint versus Text and Conversation

I do not want to leave the wrong impression in the last two posts covering the over use of measurement with wine and poetry. Before we get into a discussion on the over use of measurement on content, I want to acknowledge that there is a place for precision. This post provides additional context for our next discussion on content. Echoing Nick Carr on Google, Gen. James N. Mattis of the US Marine Corps is quoted in a New York Times article by Elizabeth Bumiller, We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint, as saying “PowerPoint makes us stupid.” This occurred at a military conference in North Carolina and he spoke without PowerPoint.

The Times article then goes on to quote Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005. “It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. “Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.” However, some junior officers in Iraq spend most of their day preparing Powerpoint.

While bullet points are not the same as measurements, there is a valid comparison of the concerns here. Bumiller writes that, “commanders say that behind all the PowerPoint jokes are serious concerns that the program stifles discussion, critical thinking and thoughtful decision-making,” echoes of Robin Williams on Pritchard.

Bumiller, adds, “Commanders say that the slides impart less information than a five-page paper can hold, and that they relieve the briefer of the need to polish writing to convey an analytic, persuasive point. Imagine lawyers presenting arguments before the Supreme Court in slides instead of legal briefs.” It may be coming soon.

As Marshall McLuhan wrote, a communication medium is more than an empty vessel. It helps structure the content and the thought process of the user. I had the pleasure of sitting in on some of his classes as a psych grad student at the University of Toronto in the 70s where I studied the effects of media on cognition. As the classical scholar Eric Havelock wrote in The Origins of Western Literacy, one of the unintended benefits of the development of the phonetic alphabet was the development of the logical essay.  Text not only freed our minds from the heavy memory requirements of the oral tradition but it opened up new forms of communication and thought. 

In the pre-writing oral tradition, the conditions for the preservation of ideas were mnemonic. To promote memory, instruction and knowledge preservation made use of verbal and musical rhythms; however, these rhythms placed severe limits on the verbal arrangement of what was said, as in Homer, and the need to memorize used up cognitive energy that otherwise could have been devoted to learning. Because of the heavy memory load, the epic poets did not actually memorize content verbatim; they created new versions from a set of possibilities as they went along.

The concept of an original version that could be preserved did not evolve until after written text. This was critical to the development of modern science and essential for many forms of instruction, as well as the logical essay. In many ways, the epic poets, chief knowledge distributors of their day, made up the details as they went along. Text made available a visual record of thought, abolishing the need for an acoustic record and hence the need for rhythms. Greek thought changed and such works as Plato’s “Republic” are described by some scholars, such as Havelock, as an attack on the oral poetic tradition of knowledge distribution.

This did not mean the older form of communication, epic poetry, lost a role. Poetry was just was allowed to focus on what it did well, as Robin Williams argued in the last post in this series.

What are we losing with Powerpoint? Are we losing some of the precise thinking power that text led us to embrace? The US Military is not a hot bed of radical academic thought but they are concerned with real life impacts. They are willing to try new things and were one of the early users of knowledge management as it produced results.  Some in the military are now concerned that Powerpoint has dumbed down content and reduced effectiveness of operations as a consequence.  It has reduced precision in communication in places where it is vitally needed.

While there is certainly a place for measurement driven search as argued in earlier posts in this series, Powerpoint is standing on shakier ground, But we see no sign of it going away nor does the US Military. We still use it ourselves at Darwin at times but we need to be aware of the consequences and guard against one-sided over use.  We need to allow for conversation. Nick Carr addresses some analogous concerns on the effects of measurement driven search on our thought processes in the next and final part of this series.

Ironically, the Times article concludes the article with the observation from the military that Powerpoint “does come in handy when the goal is not imparting information, as in briefings for reporters. The news media sessions often last 25 minutes, with 5 minutes left at the end for questions from anyone still awake.” These types of PowerPoint presentations are known as “hypnotizing chickens.” This is not a typo the writer really means not imparting information.

Post Script: Jon Stewart also reported on this story and ran a series of great warriors in history and in Stars Wars using Powerpoint to convey their strategy and rally the troops. You can imagine the results.