How PowerPoint Makes You Stupid by Franck Frommer

Author:Franck Frommer
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781595587534
Publisher: The New Press

A “PERFORMANCE OF KNOWLEDGE”

Advertising, business, and political show are all uses of PowerPoint presentations that demonstrate the plasticity of a device used as much as an advanced prompter as a scientific alibi or a dramaturgical accessory. The millions of presentations made around the world every day fail, of course, to match the star models. But as the saying goes, If you can do the hard part, the rest is easy. The most troubling thing is that this form of “digital rhetoric” is used in every sector of activity.

To bring out the new forms of the language of political argument in the era of digital media, the sociologists David Stark and Verena Paravel point to the example of the reception given the seven architects’ proposals for the reconstruction of the World Trade Center. And they demonstrate how, thanks to the variety of media at its disposal, PowerPoint can present stories overflowing with emotion designed to win over a jury judging the proposals:

All the architects’ presentations were stories of remembrance, reconciliation, and renaissance; all were dedicated to making a resurrected global city. Their task of representing rebirth was facilitated by one of the most powerful affordances of PowerPoint technology. Thanks to the exact over-impression of slides and the skill with which they paced it, architects could produce the feeling that, from a monumentally tragic occurrence, a life-affirming opportunity could emerge.30

Stark and Paravel note that all the competing firms worked with the effects made possible by the software to animate, make their presentations “alive” and dynamic, particularly the technique of over-impression, which brings life out of a field of ruins, something that would be totally impossible with flip charts: “Technical function meets rhetorical purpose with persuasive effect.” PowerPoint does not show two images, a before and an after; it stages the rebirth. It makes it possible to show the progress of the project and the living character of the process. The architects were faced with a challenge, because they had to show the monumental character of the project while simultaneously establishing close contact with the audience. Aside from the usual commonplaces (such as photographs of mothers and children), the presenters relied on cinematic effects like the alternation between wide and tight views, between close-ups and tracking shots. Finally, 3-D images allowed the audience to enter the building.

In this performance context, it is worth considering the interaction among the presenter, his projection, the accessories, and the audience. Analyzing the stage performance and particularly the role of the pointer in a certain number of presentations, Knoblauch, as we have seen, defines the PowerPoint presentation as a “performance of knowledge.”31 The technological relationship adds a supplemental mediation to the traditional lecture format, turning it into a hybrid, representative of what the information (or knowledge) society now produces. It is a hybrid insofar as this type of performance borrows from the scientific and academic spheres while using registers taken from management practices: “Although visual media in lectures had long been common in education and the scientific world,

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