Posted on Wed, Jan. 22, 2003

Julia Keller:

Chicago Tribune

Halftime.

Your football team is behind – way, way behind – and there’s a feeling in the locker room of heavy, clotted gloom. Everyone slouches on the floor against lockers and benches. Doom-induced lethargy pervades the place. Even the towels are too limp to swat at a teammate’s derriere. And then the coach appears. Moving purposefully to the center of the room, he eyes the despairing players. He rubs his hands together as if they were kindling for inspiration.

At this point, the coach can:

_Deliver a rousing, emotion-laced speech exhorting the players to press on in the face of tremendous adversity and daunting odds, or

_Cue up a PowerPoint presentation on the six keys to victory, including bulleted items such as “Proper blocking and tackling,” “Exhibiting a winning attitude,” “Turning weaknesses into strengths” and “Don’t focus on the scoreboard,” along with a multimedia photo montage of memorable game-winning plays set to the soundtrack of “Rudy.”

Which approach is more likely to send the team back onto the field poised for a comeback?

Your answer instantly drop-kicks you into one of two camps:

_Those who believe in the power of a freewheeling address, full of digressions and personal chemistry, to change hearts and minds most effectively.

_Those who believe in PowerPoint.

And while the cultural scoreboard may be invisible, this much is indisputable: The PowerPoint people are winning.

Actually, it’s not even close. PowerPoint, the public-speaking application included in the Microsoft Office software package, is one of the most pervasive and ubiquitous technological tools ever concocted. In less than a decade, it has revolutionized the worlds of business, education, science and communications, swiftly becoming the standard for just about anybody who wants to explain just about anything to just about anybody else. From corporate middle managers reporting on production goals to fourth graders fashioning a show-and-tell on the French and Indian War to church pastors explicating the seven deadly sins – although seven is a trifle too many bullet points for an audience to absorb comfortably, as any veteran PowerPoint user will tell you – the software seems to be everywhere.

The phenomenon parallels the rise of the presentation as the basic unit of group communication. To be sure, there have always been presentations – although Martin Luther managed to get his 95 theses across just by nailing them to a church door – but they used to be low-key affairs accompanied by chalkboards or large pads of paper on easels. A great deal of interpersonal communication got done simply by means of that reviled but effective tool known as the memo.

Then came the 1970s, the era that brought us role-playing games, bonding and the sharing of feelings, soon to be followed by the 1980s, an epoch of networking, business retreats and mission statements. Communal settings began to be seen as the ideal venue for the transfer of information, not only because of various economies of scale but because the shoulder-to-shoulder atmosphere seemed to add validation to the material and a general bonhomie that helped cement the organization. Suddenly, like oaks toppling unheard in the forest, ideas seemed to lack existence if they weren’t first trotted out in front of a large group of colleagues by a presenter armed with “visual aids” – overhead transparencies or photographic slides.

But slides and transparencies are often difficult to create. Moreover, the thought of presenting was enough to paralyze many people trying to make their way unobtrusively through the shoals of large organizations and research establishments. Nobody could possibly have enough slides to fill an entire presentation without verbal content. Sooner or later the speaker would have to … talk! … doing so from either a dry, prepared text or, God help them, from memory or even off the cuff.

It was into this breach that PowerPoint leaped. With PowerPoint, you could fit your entire presentation onto a computer disk and use a laptop to project it, in sequential order, onto a screen that the audience could watch. All your information and visuals could be arranged on discrete “pages” or “slides” full of headings and bulleted points that broke your talk down into coherent bits, similar to the outlines that your elementary school teacher tried vainly to teach you in the days when the only networking you wanted to do was watch “Scooby-Doo” and “The Munsters.”

All at once, no more slides, no more overheads. Visuals could be scanned directly into the computer and inserted at appropriate places in your program. If you wished, PowerPoint had a variety of graphics you could also nab. Best of all, while you couldn’t put all your spoken text onto the screen, you could get enough up there to quell your fears of public speaking.

At best, you could embellish upon the bullet points, confident that nerves wouldn’t cause you to lose your place as your talk proceeded. At worst, you could stand up there and just recite the bullets as your entire speech, reading them aloud off the screen as if your audience were a tribe of illiterate backwoodsmen who had somehow wandered into a presentation on “A Stochastic Approach to Inelastic Demand for Durable Goods Using a Multifarious Economic Model.”

But PowerPoint has a dark side. It squeezes ideas into a preconceived format, organizing and condensing not only your material but – inevitably, it seems – your way of thinking about and looking at that material. A complicated, nuanced issue invariably is reduced to headings and bullets. And if that doesn’t stultify your thinking about the subject, it may have that effect on your audience – which is at the mercy of your presentation.

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