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Does PowerPoint make us stupid?

»Visual artists say Microsoft Corp.'s popular "slideware" -- which makes it easy to incorporate animated graphics and other entertainment into presentations -- lulls people into accepting pablum over ideas. Foes say PowerPoint's ubiquity perverts everything from elementary school reports to NASA's scientific theses into sales pitches with bullet points and stock art.

One of the Internet's inventors, Vint Cerf, gets laughs from audiences by quipping, "Power corrupts and PowerPoint corrupts absolutely."

Cerf, now an MCI executive and chairman of the Internet's key oversight body, doesn't shun PowerPoint completely, but said avoiding it "actually improves communication because people have to listen rather than being distracted by fancy PowerPoint charts."

Edward R. Tufte, a Yale University professor and author of graphic design book "Envisioning Information," is perhaps the most vocal PowerPoint hater. He believes PowerPoint's emphasis on format over content commercializes and trivializes subjects.

In a Wired magazine editorial in September titled "PowerPoint Is Evil," Tufte compared PowerPoint presentations to a school play: "very loud, very slow, and very simple."

Peter Norvig, 46, engineering director at Google Inc., is generally credited with creating the first PowerPoint parody in 1999, when he published an online slideshow of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. The spoof, which by Norvig's estimate has been viewed by at least 500,000 people, includes bullet points such as "unfinished work (great tasks)," "new birth of freedom" and "government not perish."

Norvig, who recently ordered a copy of Byrne's compilation for himself, said Byrne is wading in treacherous waters.

"People are asking whether, ultimately, PowerPoint makes us all stupid, or does it help us streamline our thoughts?" said Norvig, who first saw Talking Heads in the late '70s. "My belief is that PowerPoint doesn't kill meetings. People kill meetings. But using PowerPoint is like having a loaded AK-47 on the table: You can do very bad things with it."«

[Extracted from http://www.cnn.com/2003/TECH/ptech/12/30/byrne.powerpoint.ap/index.html]