Powerpoint
“Slideware may help speakers outline their talks, but convenience for the speaker can be punishing to both content and audience.”
The Gettysburg Powerpoint that we had to read for this week is the living embodiment of this quote. It takes one of the most important and passionate speeches, digitizes it, breaks it down into data, and presents it in an unusually ugly slideshow presentation. Powerpoint presentations and slideshows are great for business meetings or venues where raw data needs to be analyzed but it does degrade the quality of what is being presented. Inspiring employees, or in Lincoln’s case a broken nation isn’t possible by showing them numbers. Most people hate math so I think there is a psychological rejection that occurs when someone is shown a statistic of how they are performing versus a more creative method like a video or speech.
A real world example I can think of where the traditional presentation format is being changed is with Apple’s keynote presentations that they hold whenever they release a new product or product update. in past years there has been a lot of focus on sales numbers during said presentations but recently the keynotes have shifted more towards focusing on the people who build these products and the people who are buying them. Apple now often inserts videos between slides to show off a new iPhone being sold at one of their stores rather than showing the raw data of how many phones they have sold.