PowerPoint Is Making Us Lazy, Not Stupid

In 2003 rock star and artist David Byrne was asking, "Does PowerPoint make us stupid?" and began using it as a spoof art medium. He was not alone in his concern that the business world's addiction to this as "the" method of communication has dumbed down our ideas to what can be said in a few bullet points.

The New Yorker ran a story in 2001 criticizing PowerPoint as contributing to the intellectual decline of Americans and again in 2003 they questioned the role of PowerPoint in the Columbia disaster as an inarticulate method of presentation that lead to a flawed conclusion.

PowerPoint's role in business seems to be the focus of continuous meetings. A quickly put together collection of slides, sketching out unfinished ideas, can make it seem that progress is being made; and an estimated 20 million PowerPoint presentations are given each day. This should be alarming just in the financial cost to business, much less the implications to our collective intellectual discipline. Intellectual discourse used to be about theorems and proofs. Our ideas are now squeezed into a format of slides and bullets points, all in large type, accompanied by bar graphs and pie charts.

Edward R. Tufte is a vocal PowerPoint critic and Yale professor of information design. He published a paper in 2003 called, "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint." One of his criticisms is the lack of "information density" resulting in watered down ideas confined to a linear format that does not support critical thinking. Tufte also cited instances where this presentation method lead to an incomplete understanding of the information, with far reaching consequences.

Critics of Tufte argue that PowerPoint is meant as a visual aid for "talks" and that an information dense visual aid is boring. They suggest that complex ideas and decision processes are hard to work through in the time frame of a "meeting." Intellectuals need to continue to relay on journals and research articles for complex thoughts and extensive explanations.

The widespread reliance on the use of PowerPoint as a method of communicating is perhaps not making us stupid but is dumbing down what information we share. PowerPoint presentations don't challenge your critical thinking, as the format lends itself to passive observation. The main concern may not be the medium but how it is used. Our culture has become dependent on information bites, often drawing conclusions from these bits of information. Even though what makes a sound bite is what will catch the attention, not the definitive points. PowerPoint is potentially the presentation equivalent of these sound bites. It may be our lack of creativity and intellectual laziness that over uses PowerPoint. That laziness also allows us to draw parallels between the PowerPoint business meeting and Newton Minow's "Vast Wasteland" commentary on television.

David Byrne started exploring PowerPoint as an art medium in response to his perceptions of its negative impact on how people communicate. He has since become fascinated producing multimedia art projects which are on display in selected galleries. Business's mundane examples of PowerPoint are on display near you at your next meeting.