Power Point is the Point

After sitting through an allegedly live presentation at a conference recently, during which the allegedly live presenter simply read from the Power Point® bullets on the screen, and which bullets he had (thoughtfully) provided as photostatic handouts, I realized that Marshall McLuhan was right. The medium WAS the message. The message, the whole message, and nothing but the message. That got me thinking that perhaps there was no more depth to the talk than what was there in front of me. These weren’t bullets, these were the whole megillah. And that got me thinking even more, that maybe Power Point® was the problem in the first place. It used to be that someone with something to say got up, and referred to some notes, or read from a text, and projected a couple of graphs or charts, made of real materials, and photographed with film, to make slides. This was time consuming and costly, and so only a few necessary illustrations were generally presented. The rest was the verbal meat of the presentation. One assumed that the expert had lots more to say, but limited time, and questions were entertained at the end. Nowadays it is easy and cheap to make hundreds of charts and graphs, and to project them. The presentation, such as it is, is a rendition of the slides, often delivered in a monotone. Perhaps this is a concession to the needs of the visually and auditorily impaired, but it is death by boredom to those of us who can read and hear. And the presenters generally have nothing to add. They might as well be newscasters. So could it be true that they have literally nothing more to say than the bullets? Could it be so that rather than being reduced to bullets, the thought process never went any deeper? Could it be that the goal of the expert was to rise to the level of a Power Point® presentation, and no higher? Or that no higher goal, no deeper understanding even exists? Given the ubiquity of Power Point® in the landscape, I began to worry. What if all of our foreign policy was basically a Power Point® presentation? What if the planning for the Iraq war was entirely a Power Point® presentation? What if our official understanding of the insurgency and its may tangled allegiances runs no deeper than the screen shots? It seems entirely plausible to me, suddenly, that the HMFIC sees the world in this way, thinks in this way, and is fed additional input in this way, and in almost no other way. Did the wizards who designed the program anticipate this reductio ad absurdum result when they marketed this monster? What would they say now if they knew? What would J. Robert Oppenheimer tell them about the larger consequences of progress? But wait...Why did they name it “Power Point” in the first place? I never quite understood the marketing reasoning for the title when it first hit the scene. Maybe they knew all along. That is too Orwellian a path to tread, so I’ll stop. But still I worry.