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.

October 16, 2006 (2): Rhetoric Redux?

I was delighted to see Dominic Sayers' encomium for Edward Tufte on Confused of Calcutta, so I would like to use that opportunity to take things to the next level. I would like to argue that Tufte’s impact goes far deeper than visual literacy. Using Newton Garver’s Preface to a collection of essays by Jacques Derrida as a point of departure, I would claim that Tufte is addressing an issue that goes all the way back to the scholastic trivium of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. Our modernist thinking has made great strides in our command of grammar and logic, but it seems to have done so at the expense of our appreciation for rhetoric. Tufte’s appreciation for rhetoric is particularly evident in an interview he gave to Mark Zachry and Charlotte Thralls in which he discussed his book Beautiful Evidence. Furthermore, when we consider the full title of Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative, we see that Tufte has a keen intuition for the literary theory of text types. This has nothing to do with how fonts are designed and used. Rather, it is an effort to classify texts (in the most general sense of the term) into the categories of argumentation, description, exposition, and narrative. Tufte’s recent concern with evidence addresses how his concerns with design impact argumentation, while Envisioning Information makes solid contributions to both description and exposition. I believe that Visual Explanations was his first serious effort in the area of narrative, although he was already addressing narrative in The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.

The point I am trying to make from my own reading of Tufte is that it is not only visual literacy that is at stake. Rather, it is the full scope of literacy, where rhetoric is as important as grammar and logic and where that rhetoric is exhibited in the text types of argumentation, description, exposition, and narrative, whether the “texts” are traditional documents or PowerPoint presentations. As a matter of fact, rhetoric also comes into play in the conversations we hold; so I believe that we can invoke Tufte when we deal with questions of literacy of “real-time” texts.