There's been, in this decade, some serious conversation in the print media and in cyberspace concerning PowerPoint's tendency to make the presenter look stupid and bereft of coherence(Read this piece from Tad Simons, for example).
It is the same decade in which PowerPoint, taken as a mark of savviness and with-itness, has infiltrated all sorts of NGO presentations and documentation in this part of the world and, clearly, elsewhere. The meme that it is, PowerPoint has, largely through that route, found its way into academia -- into the vast majority of the word-processed term papers and CATs that undergraduates and graduate students deliver to their lecturers, who are silently overwhelmed by the growing tide of bulletized simple-mindedness and even incoherence.
Bulletized texts and the disappearance of paragraphs and coherence are so ever-present, so matter-of-fact, that I suspect many students and 'tech-savvy' managers consider them to be just how things are supposed to be, are, and are irresistibly becoming. Because I remained unaware of the conversation I have mentioned above, until just a couple of weeks ago, I believed I was waging a losing rear-guard war against a malaise that I was determined to wage a war against, regardless. I just hadn't thought of doing a Google search for Internet chatter about PowerPoint. My loss, for I would have been more evidence-based in my expressons of unease regarding PowerPoint.
It was with great surprise and relief, then, that, on April 27 (to be precise), I came upon the bold assertion, by a US Joint Forces Commander of all people(via a tweet by @Crossdawson), that "PowerPoint makes us stupid". I immediately retweeted it (@MauriYambo). For the full story, which I urge all to read, click here.
There's more online than the above links suggest, as a Google search will quickly reveal.
A Contra Contrarian View:
For a "contrarian" support for PowerPoint, read Carmine Gallo's In Defense of PowerPoint.
