I keep giving lectures about how important it is to have extra grid capacity,
but nobody seems interested in my power points.
“Hamlet” is an early 17th century tragedy in 5 acts written by William Shakespeare,
a work consisting of nearly thirty-thousand words and published in its current form in
his First Folio, typeset by Isaac Jaggard onto 31 pages, with two columns of text per page.
“Hamlet” was a dramatic performance by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men for King James the First in
1619, with Richard Burbage cast in the titular role, belting his lines from the creaky wooden
stage to the second story gallery seats at the old Globe Theater. “Hamlet” is a lavish 1996 film
by Kenneth Branagh that cost over $18 million dollars to produce, a whopping 4-hour cinematic
behemoth featuring an extensive cast of famous actors, including Robin Williams, Kate Winslet,
Gerard Depardieu, and Judi Dench, shown briefly in theaters and nominated for 4 academy awards.
“Hamlet” is a 2009 webcomic by Dan Carrol, each of its 329 pages illustrated with charmingly
quirky stick figures in black and white, with a number of pop culture references and visual
gags that are impressively funny within the limitations of its MS Paint-style artwork.
These Hamlets are all identical in *content* - they each contain the full text of Shakespeare’s
play, every single word. The original printed text, the physical paper and ink version with
its printing defects and funny s’s, has some one-to-one correspondence with the words spoken in
the Kenneth Branagh film, but even ignoring things like historical, cultural, or personal context,
which can change from century to century or performance to performance, any description of
what *meaning* should be conveyed by each of these versions of Hamlet is going to extend beyond their
*content*, the words themselves. It’s necessarily going to involve their *form* - the details
of how those words are embodied. The content still matters, to be sure - a Hamlet without
a “To Be or Not To Be” is no Hamlet at all. But trying to discuss the content’s meaning somehow
*independent* of its form, or vice-versa, is ignoring the critical interplay between the two.
Aiming the camera up at the physically imposing Brian Blessed in full plate armor and
down at the svelte Kenneth Branagh changes the meaning of the words they speak in the play - we
see the diminutive prince as an ineffectual child in the shadow of his gargantuan father, a small,
weak boy urged to act by the ghost of a brutal man of action. “If thou hast nature in thee,
bear it not; Let not the royal bed of Denmark be A couch for luxury and damned incest.” If
Hamlet were also framed as a big strong man, that line would be a sort of “Let’s do this.” moment.
With a larger-than-life figure like Brian Blessed, staring disappointedly down at his pathetic son,
that “If” looms large. Do you have nature in you, boy? The meaning of the words is
literally different. There’s no stage direction for any of that in the paper copy of the play,
just…“Enter ghost and Hamlet.” …goft and Hamlet?
The intimate relationship between form and content might seem like a nerdy concern for philosophers
and literary analysts, but it’s thrumming away under dozens of choices you make every day.
Should I fire off a quick email, or would it be better to compose some sort of memo or report?
Can I do this on my phone, or should I get out my laptop? What language should I write this code in?
Would it be better to text or call your mother? (You should call your mother.) Even your decision
about how to watch this video, or just listen to it in the background as you wash dishes,
carries an implicit judgment about what form you think is best-suited for getting the meaning you
want out of it. There’s certainly *something* that all those different experiences have in common,
but these words are going to mean something different if you’re hearing them over
earbuds on a bus versus watching me say them on a 70-inch TV in your living room.
Unfortunately, as pop-media-theorist Marshall McLuhann famously highlighted, we have a tendency
to focus intently on the “content” part of media, the text or maybe implied meaning of the text,
often to the exclusion of everything else. This is doubly true if it conforms to cultural practices
and norms - you don’t notice the font choice of an email, unless it’s *not* black eleven-point
Calibri or Arial. You don’t notice that YouTube videos are 16 by 9 until you run into an upload
of some old TV show with big bars on either side of the screen. As with most cultural practices,
these norms are a result of conscious decisions, evolved practicality, and random chance,
but importantly, they do not become semantically inert…just because they are defaults. Even if the
shape of our creative output conforms to the expectations of our audience, that shape still
has a profound influence on what can and will be interpreted on their end. A sixteen-by-nine
aspect ratio *does* *something* to the meaning of a YouTube video, whether I want it to or not.
This implies a question: how, exactly, do the “default” forms of media we use affect
the landscape of concepts and meanings? Are those effects…desirable? Could we avoid some
of the worst problems by paying a little more attention to where & when we choose
to use certain kinds of media, or the default forms of that media? In an exceedingly grumpy
2004 essay titled “The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint,” statistician, political scientist,
computer scientist, and data visualization theorist Edward Tufte advances an argument that
the explosion in popularity of Powerpoint slides has had significant ramifications for the speed,
detail, and effectiveness of technical communication. He highlights numerous
issues endemic to the *form* of Powerpoint, pressures of the medium that *might* be mitigated
by a careful author taking special pains to work around them, but taken all together,
might well compel a careful author to think twice about using Powerpoint in the first place.
Take information density. Tufte asserts that Powerpoint is an exceptionally low-bandwith medium
for raw information - the average graphic in a Powerpoint contains only 12 numbers,
comparable to works of political propaganda, and the average slide only contains about 15 words,
a density on par with billboards. Compared to the information density of something like
a single page from a cookbook or a newspaper, you’d need dozens and dozens of slides to
cover the same ground - not impossible, but probably unwieldy, if not totally opaque.
He also notes that the preferred Powerpoint organizational framework of bullet pointed lists
creates an often mistaken impression of linearity & hierarchy - bullets can only convey sequence,
priority, or membership in a set. Relationships like…causality, feedback loops, emergence,
simultaneity, or any other pattern of nonlinear organization can’t be elegantly represented
this way. Bullet points might give the reassuring *appearance* of well-structured analytic thought,
but if the subject actually demands consideration of one of these sorts of relationships,
well, you’d never know if the author thought about them or not.
Tufte cites several real-life examples of what he considers to be the corrosive effect of Powerpoint
on technical communication, including a vicious teardown of some of the slides NASA management
used to make decisions that ultimately led to the Columbia space shuttle disaster,
suggesting that a simple engineering whitepaper would have communicated the necessary information
about damage to the shuttle’s wing with much more fidelity & much less noise and ambiguity, He also
critiques the whole vibe of Powerpoint itself, suggesting that the program mirrors the structure
and priorities of Microsoft, an unholy hybrid of slick marketing style-over-substance and brutish,
myopic, algorithmic thinking. He asks: What could be a worse metaphor for good presentation?
Tufte’s essay has been enormously popular in the 20 years since he first published it,
cited over 1400 times and finding its way into a fair amount of academic
research on the effects and effectiveness of Powerpoint in technical communication
and, more and more frequently, education. For example, a deliciously snarky literature review
by Russell Craig and Joel Amernic details several findings on how classrooms are being changed by
increasingly pervasive Powerpoint pedagogy. They report that classes that use Powerpoint
*do not* perform markedly better at recall or testing than traditional lecture classes.
The use of Powerpoint measurably dampens some of the interpersonal aspects of scholarship,
including things like reading a class’s response or engaging them in discussion,
encouraging more of a “conduit” or “transfer” model of education, where the role of the
instructor is simply to upload the requisite knowledge into the students, instead of, say,
building it collaboratively. It discourages activities like free association, comparison,
creative thinking, or skepticism, as the flow of a slide deck sort of forbids interruption,
and makes backtracking or side-discussions distracting, rather than elucidating.
Even in the midst of these findings, Craig and Amernic raise some meager counters to Tufte’s
uniformly pessimistic view, suggesting that Powerpoint *can* be an effective teaching tool
in the right hands, if the presenter is competent & navigates their way carefully around its various
pitfalls and failure modes. That certainly seems plausible - I don’t think anyone would argue
that it’s impossible to give an informative, high-bandwidth, high-fidelity presentation
with a series of slides. But it’s worth asking, does the *form* of Powerpoint constrain or shift
the landscape of meaning in a way that makes effective pedagogy and technical communication
harder than it might be using some other medium? Could it be that, by making Powerpoint the default
medium for these contexts, we’re causing more issues on balance than we would otherwise?
What other *forms* of media might stand an honest appraisal of how suitable they
are for their intended meaning? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you THUNK.