Let’s get it straight, right upfront:
There’s an MIT prof named Edward Tufte, for whom I have great respect. The man’s written some great and beautifully illustrated books about the visual display of information, and cialis cheap the man’s greatest challenge is convincing the world of how badly PowerPoint has screwed-up that process. Let’s get it straight: I hate Microsoft. Windows – ripping off Mac OS (way back when), the way Office components run on Macs, and most of all for PowerPoint. It IS one of the symbols of what’s wrong with the modern world, led of course by multinationals, like Microsoft, most of which originated in the USA. Do I hate the US? No, not particularly. But I do hate Microsoft, PowerPoint and the depauperization of information (to paraphrase, Edward Tufte)? Most certainly! And Since Apple has played right into the mediocrity-for-profit game, they can go eat shit, as well!

I used to be a professor, but in the era BPP. No not BC, BPP— Before PowerPoint. Here’s the difference in being an academic (or a researcher for, let’s say a national laboratory, before and after Powerpoint. For now, we’ll leave out industrial researchers, assuming that they can’t fit into this stereotype (which I may change my mind about, later). You’re ensconced in a complex and challenging research project, and are making progress, but also hitting walls with challenges you’re not absolutely certain you can surmount.  In the era BPP, what do you do?  Simple, you keep a notebook of your research, and you go either to the published literature or to some smart colleague — or both — and you investigate the possibilities for moving forward. Maybe, and only maybe, if someone invites you to present your reserch at a symposium, do you take the time to put together a talk with some overhead transparencies, regarding your progress; and you do so, with the genuine hope that someone at the symposium will have something helpful for you in the way of an idea to pursue.  But above all you were conservative, in the true sense of the word — not overstepping what you actually accomplished , being self-congratulatory, or glitzing-it-up for effect to accomplish that end.

Conversely APP, there is every temptation to do just that, and users can significantly over-represent and overblow their actual achievements, making their research sound like the greatest thing since the electron.  And in my experience, that’s precisely what they, in fact, very frequently do.  Oh sure, there are a few researchers who resist.  But the temptation of PowerPoint is far too seductive, pandering to the worst impulses in human nature. It has simply extended the fantasy world in which most brainless humans  prefer to live, broadening it, so that, now, even the “most-intelligent” humans participate in this phantasmagoria.  A talented designer friend of mine frames it this way: ” they all get so taken, so fascinated with it that, suddenly, it becomes ‘about’ PowerPoint and what it can do, not about communicating the information contained therein.”

No, not American idol, but rather , “All hail, PowerPoint.”  If y’all knew how many people in my scope of contact—hundreds, perhaps thousands—spend huge chunks of their workdays massaging some set of PowerPoint slides that the underling below them in the org chart just got finished massaging . . . and that once they do their mad massage, the Oberführer just above them in the org chart will take & begin to spend countless hours massaging . . . oh muh lordie, what a waste of time, energy, & resources!