It must have been about ten years ago that I was sitting in a meeting at which John Seely Brown talked about the "new genre of rhetoric" that PowerPoint was imposing on our discourse (not to be confused with Chaim Perelman's "new rhetoric"). In spite of my agreement with John, I was still not prepared to read an article in today's New York Times that was basically about a PowerPoint slide (reproduced above). Quite honestly, I am still not sure what to make of it. I suppose my most negative reaction is that this may be the ultimate reductio ad absurdum of "dashboard thinking," that notorious fad of so much enterprise software, which, by reducing the complexities of a situation to a display of a few quantitative parameters, tends to be little more than a crutch for avoiding more serious thinking. However, there is also a positive side, which is that, if words fail to convince, the best alternative is a "killer picture;" and this picture is about as "killer" as you can get. At the end of the day, I think I prefer the positive side. After all, it was the "killer pictures" of Thomas Nast that eventually brought down Boss Tweed (who actually called them "damned pictures") and his corrupt establishment at Tammany Hall. If this is what it takes to convince our Administration and the general public of the extent of the failure of our "adventure" in Iraq, then I suppose I have to subscribe to the pragmatic philosophy that you go with what works.
Monday, June 22, 2009
November 01, 2006 (1): PowerPoint Rhetoric
It must have been about ten years ago that I was sitting in a meeting at which John Seely Brown talked about the "new genre of rhetoric" that PowerPoint was imposing on our discourse (not to be confused with Chaim Perelman's "new rhetoric"). In spite of my agreement with John, I was still not prepared to read an article in today's New York Times that was basically about a PowerPoint slide (reproduced above). Quite honestly, I am still not sure what to make of it. I suppose my most negative reaction is that this may be the ultimate reductio ad absurdum of "dashboard thinking," that notorious fad of so much enterprise software, which, by reducing the complexities of a situation to a display of a few quantitative parameters, tends to be little more than a crutch for avoiding more serious thinking. However, there is also a positive side, which is that, if words fail to convince, the best alternative is a "killer picture;" and this picture is about as "killer" as you can get. At the end of the day, I think I prefer the positive side. After all, it was the "killer pictures" of Thomas Nast that eventually brought down Boss Tweed (who actually called them "damned pictures") and his corrupt establishment at Tammany Hall. If this is what it takes to convince our Administration and the general public of the extent of the failure of our "adventure" in Iraq, then I suppose I have to subscribe to the pragmatic philosophy that you go with what works.
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