|
|
|
Killing Me Microsoftly with
PowerPoint
读MBA也好,做销售也好,看家本领之一就是要会做一手漂亮的PowerPoint文件。PowerPoint固然有它简单直观地说明问题的好处，但它若成了放之四海而皆准的表达方式，那可真够叫人揪心的。 PowerPoint, the public-speaking application included in the Microsoft Office software package, is one of the most pervasive and ubiquitous technological tools ever concocted.1 In less than a decade, it has revolutionized2 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 4th-graders fashioning a show-and-tell on the French and Indian War to church pastors explicating the seven deadly sins3 - although seven is a trifle too many bullet points for an audience to absorb comfortably,4 as any veteran PowerPoint user will tell you - the software seems to be everywhere. With PowerPoint, you could fit your entire presentation onto a computer disk and use a laptop to project it,5 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.6 Its astonishing popularity, the way it has spread exponentially through the culture, seems analogous, in a way, to drugs.7 Think of it as technological cocaine - so effortless to embrace initially, so difficult to relinquish after that.8 People who once use PowerPoint generally don't stop using it. PowerPoint may be an easier way to present information, but is it a better way? PowerPoint squeezes ideas into a preconceived format, organizing and condensing9 not only your material but - inevitably, it seems - your way of thinking about and looking at that material. It is changing not only the way we do business and educate our young, but also the way we think. "I hate PowerPoint," says Jay Phelan, a biologist at the University of California. Most of Phelan's colleagues use PowerPoint in their lectures and his students often request such presentations from him. But he resists distilling the contents of his lectures - the creative interplay of a teacher's knowledge and the students' hunger for ideas, as manifested in rhetorical display - into a series of bullet items.10 The point of PowerPoint is what makes it dangerous to our imaginations. With all the ready templates and AutoContent Wizard,11 Microsoft makes PowerPoint much easier to use. From a hefty list of potential speech topics, you click on the one you want, say, "Project Overview", "Selling Your Ideas", etc., and the software burps out some 10 to 12 slides with prompts and even some virtual text.12 More than 80 percent of the presentations given by business school students rely on PowerPoint rather than the old-fashioned flowing narrative13. "But what's fine for a business professional might not be so fine for a child," says Sherry Turkle, a professor at MIT, "They change how our kids grow up and how they process information. PowerPoint doesn't teach children to make an argument. It encourages presentation, not conversation. Students grow accustomed to not being challenged.14 A strong presentation is designed to close down debate, rather than open it up." What sort of world is reflected in PowerPoint?
A world stripped down to briefly summarized essences, a world snipped
clean of the annoying underbrush of ambiguity and complication. 15°? |