Friday, November 19, 2010

Powerpoint

Powerpoint is a popular business tool for information destruction. How I dislike it. It's not even the terrible interface for interacting with it and generating content for it: It's the culture. I've never understood the preference for delivering and ingesting information of any kind by sitting through a ritual where a talking meat person is providing a television-like linear narrative and delivering an out-of-band side channel of crucial information as a gap-filler for the otherwise missing content from the by-themselves mostly meaningless outlined talking points and images presented on the screen.

The culture of powerpoint further rewards all kinds of emotional delivery attributes. The succesful powerpoint presenter has to be a grossly intrusive and persuasive salesman. I don't want that to be part of an information-delivery process.

Give me content in an information-complete format I can take with me, study and review and cross-reference even long after my feeble biological memory would have forgotten the words that came out of your yammering meat mouth during our meeting. Make it interactive, hyperlinked, indexed and searchable. Give me this content BEFORE we meet so that I may study it on my own terms and we can respect each others time and reserve our expensive, brief opportunity for synchronicity on discussing the information we by this point should have already shared in full.

Death to powerpoint

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