'One Damn Slide After Another': Powerpoint at Every Occasion For Speech

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'One Damn Slide After Another': PowerPoint at Every Occasion for Speech
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“One Damn Slide After Another”: PowerPoint at Every

Occasion for Speech
Posted By matthew On 11/01/2016 @ 20:26 In Article,Issue Five | Comments Disabled
Introduction
PowerPoint is installed on more than a billion computers.1 It is the indispensable medium
for presentation, one of the most ubiquitous software applications in the world. It has
likely been used to raise more money than any other tool in history.2 Teachers rely on
PowerPoint. Elementary schoolchildren make presentations and so do researchers in the
sciences, arts, and humanities. Sunday sermons are increasingly delivered with slideware
just as press conferences, trials, and military briefings have also become occasions for
slides. They say the president of the United States sees PowerPoint presentations in the
situation room.
Figure 1. PowerPoint in church on Easter Sunday, 2015.
Seldom if ever has a commercial device exercised such dominance on the principal forms
of public speech. For more than twenty-five years PowerPoint has shown up at lectures,
events, talks, sermons, and briefings. What once were distinct occasions have now become
formatted in the genre of the commercial demonstration. PowerPoint provides a common
infrastructure, a template for the organization of speech, and for the logic of
argumentation. As such, it shapes and produces the world. Nevertheless, the application
has been almost entirely unremarked upon by critical scholars of media, technology, and
the digital humanities. Why? Despite extraordinary claims about the total domination of
algorithms, protocols, the digital, bits, and information, the material conditions of
mundane software use go largely under-recognized as key sites for cultural work. Where,
for example are the books about tax software, bug databases, or personal calendaring
applications? Perhaps the omission is part of a larger failure to enact an everyday turn.
Perhaps it is simply hard to see the forest for the trees.3
This essay critically contextualizes PowerPoint. We argue that many of the stylistic
conventions associated with slideware have long been part of business communications.
Personal computing, however, scaled up the production of presentations. Doing so linked
knowledge work with personal expression. The result has been the rise of presentation
culture. In an information society, nearly everyone presents. Analyzing presentation
software makes visible the largely under-appreciated reliance on performative authority in
knowledge production. By inadvertently privileging the relationships between personal
computing and networked forms of sociality, cultural analysts have missed the ways
personal computing transformed public culture, the ways software reconfigured the
conditions of collective life. Engaging with such reconfigurations requires taking software
and its extended materiality seriously. The essay concludes with a discussion of alternative
presentation machineries. If we, as humanists, are to imagine futures with computational
tools we will need to critically analyze and design forms of intellectual middleware that
materialize relationships between methods of interpretation, data objects, and tools.4 We
will need to ask questions like “How does PowerPoint think and how would we like
presentation software to think?”
PowerPoint: Does it Suck or is it Evil?
PowerPoint, initially known as Presenter, was created by a Silicon Valley startup called
Forethought Inc. Founded in 1983, the company focused on developing software that
exploited the transition from character mapped to graphical interfaces. Eighteen months
later, with no viable product, the founders initiated a ‘corporate restart.’ In 1987, under
new leadership, Forethought shipped Presenter. The company sold its first 10,000 copies
within a month. Microsoft then purchased the company for $14 million in cash making it
the company’s largest acquisition at that time. By 1995 PowerPoint dominated market
share and was more profitable than the software industry as an aggregated whole.5
Despite a range of competing software packages over the years – e.g. Pixie, Harvard
Graphics, Cricket Presents, Keynote, and Prezi – PowerPoint has long been the dominant
player and its interaction paradigm has remained effectively the same. Users build one
slide at a time and control overall order and formatting via outline, slide sorter, and master
slide views. The software presumes that presentations are constructed on personal
computers with single-screens and local repositories. In 1992 transitions, animation, and
programing capabilities were introduced but current users would probably feel quite
comfortable with any earlier version of the tool.
PowerPoint’s constancy is curious in two respects. Digital media have radically scaled up in
the past twenty-five years. In the 1980s when access to media was scarce it made sense
to think of a document as comprising an entire presentation. Today repositories of
hundreds of thousands of high-resolution images are common as are computing devices
that support multiple screens. That presentations have remained unchanged in spite of
transformations in media content and distribution is in and of itself rather striking. More
striking is how dramatically public reception shifted given nothing really changed. For more
than a decade PowerPoint was a darling of the software industry. Then in the 2000s, High-
tech CEOs like IBM’s Lou Gerstner, Apple’s Steve Jobs, and Sun Microsystem’s Scott
McNealy started blaming organizational inefficiency on the software and even banned its
use. Director of Research Peter Norvig’s spoofed Gettysburg Address a la PowerPoint’s
AutoContent Wizard, for example, became Internet famous.

Figure 2. The Gettysburg Address as PowerPoint presentation.
Particularly striking were the critical voices emerging from the armed forces. Presentation
technologies like overhead transparencies, whiteboards, wall charts, and photographic
slides have long been part of military culture but PowerPoint, it seemed, ruined briefings.
Military commanders sounded like critical cultural analysts as they warned the public about
the dangers of decontextualized statements, the conferral of false authority on dubious
knowledge, the risks of misrepresentation inherent in software visualizations. Officers
reported devoting at least an hour per day to slide making and commanders worried as the
program became “deeply embedded in a military culture that has come to rely on
PowerPoint’s hierarchical ordering of a confused world.”6 Perhaps the concerns about
“jazzy but often incoherent visuals” were displacements of deeper critiques of the Bush
regime, a way of expressing a distaste for aesthetics in place of voicing fears that public
life hinged on the illusion of perfect mastery despite chaos and uncertainty. In a widely
circulated 2010 New York Times article General Stanley McChrystal explicitly linked
strategic failures in Afghanistan to poor presentation visuals quipping, “When we
understand that slide, we’ll have won the war.”7
Figure 3. PowerPoint slide depicting United States military strategy in Afghanistan.
In a 2003 Slate article US Air Force historian Edward Mark voiced concerns that “almost all
Air Force documents today, for example, are presented as PowerPoint briefings. They are
almost never printed and rarely stored. When they are saved, they are often
unaccompanied by any text. As a result…briefings are incomprehensible.”8 Commanders
warned that distinctions between reporting, decision-making, and archiving were blurring.9
The decontextualization of military actions reduced war to “just a targeting exercise,”
“creat[ing] the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,” and keeping people
from taking into account “political, economic, and ethnic forces.”10 Phrases like ‘death by
PowerPoint’ and ‘hypnotizing chickens’ entered the vernacular, describing the numbing
sensation accompanying slide briefings and the purposeful subjecting of crowds to
presentations that lulled their critical faculties to sleep.11
No one gained as much mileage out of critiquing PowerPoint as Edward Tufte. The maven
of lucid visualizations charged the program with destroying “the capacity for sustained,
critical thought.”12 PowerPoint stacks information in time, forcing audiences to think
sequentially rather than comparatively. Visual reading “works more effectively when
relevant information is shown side by side. Often the more intense the detail, the greater
the clarity and understanding.”13 PowerPoint prevents detailed comparisons between slides
and makes it impossible to trace relationships between parts and wholes. When you
consider the consequences of impaired analytical reasoning in mission critical situations
the implications become troublingly apparent.
The centerpiece of Tufte’s self-published tract, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, is a close
reading of NASA mission slides in which Tufte shows how PowerPoint’s graphic and
discursive mechanisms obscured essential information that could have sounded the alarm
about the possibility of an accident. When PowerPoint presentations crash shuttles (talk
about the material force of interpretation!), boring audiences with “one damn slide after
another” doesn’t just suck it’s evil.14 Ultimately, the Columbia Accident Investigation
Board agreed:
It is easy to understand how a senior manager might read this PowerPoint slide and not
realize that it addresses a life-threatening situation. At many points during its
investigation, the Board was surprised to receive similar presentation slides from NASA
officials in place of technical reports. The Board views the endemic use of PowerPoint
briefing slides instead of technical papers as an illustration of the problematic methods of
technical communication at NASA.15
In 2010 Tufte was appointed to President Obama’s Recovery Independent Advisory Panel
to help the accountability board oversee a $787 billion economic stimulus program more
effectively. At the same time, French journalist Franck Frommer published a book-length
critique of PowerPoint arguing that PowerPoint is an apparatus for neoliberal managerial
ideology. Frommer argued that although the software appears to support creativity, it
works by limiting expression and neutralizing language. Frommer described PowerPoint as
part of a model of society where “everyone had been forced, out of concern for efficiency
(always!) and in conformity to the dominant mode of thinking, to abandon any capacity to
reason, to discuss, and to criticize.”16
PowerPoint, however, is not without advocates. Talking Heads front man David Byrne, for
example, is a true believer:
Although I began by making fun of the medium, I soon realized I could actually create
things that were beautiful. … I could make works that were ‘about’ something, something
beyond themselves, and that they could even have emotional resonance. What had I
stumbled upon? Surely some techie or computer artist was already using this dumb
program as an artistic medium. I couldn’t really have this territory all to myself — or could
I?17
Figure 4. “Sea of Possibilities,” David Byrne.
After all, it is cheap, highly accessible, relatively straightforward and comes prepackaged
on most Windows machines. It can be an extraordinary story-telling format. In 2005 trial
lawyer (and part-time Baptist preacher) Mark Lanier was awarded a $253 million
settlement against the pharmaceutical giant Merck in the first of several highly publicized
trials surrounding the drug Vioxx (shown to cause heart attack and stroke). Lanier
attributed his success to PowerPoint, “I no longer consider a speech a ‘speech.’ It is now a
‘presentation.’ Anyone who simply gives a speech, rather than a presentation, is driving a
horse and buggy in the automobile age.”18
Lanier is not the only person to make his name aided by slideware. Legal scholar Lawrence
Lessig is renown for his signature presentation style, a rhythmic progression of images
paced at fifteen seconds apiece. In 2007, after a terminal diagnosis, Carnegie Mellon
Computer Science professor Randy Pausch delivered The Last Lecture, a series of slides
later repackaged as a best-selling book. Davis Guggenheim’s cinematic portrayal of former
United States Vice President Al Gore presenting on climate change garnered two Academy
Awards. Gore won the Nobel Prize. Whether formatted by Lessig or Takahashi method,
whether delivered as PechaKucha or TED talk, presentations are emblematic of twenty-first
century oral culture and its promises to reward specialists-turned-presenters with the
Internet limelight of a worldwide stage.
The Materiality of PowerPoint: The Slide as Organizing Principle
When David Byrne or Lawrence Lessig push slideware beyond its defaults they highlight
the specificities of the medium;; artists make visible the limits and possibilities in material
constraints. Close attention to PowerPoint’s materiality, however, reveals that it makes
little difference if one treats the slide as blank canvas or rhythmic sequence. Either way,
the tool uncompromisingly enforces the centrality of slides presented one-at-a-time. Large
images can extend into the workspace but never onto an adjacent slide. Transitions such
as wipes and dissolves operate across slides but they do not threaten the integrity of the
slide as the basic narrative format.
Figure 5. Media cannot extend to adjacent slides.
In slide show mode, “No window borders, scroll bars, menu bars, etc. are shown, only
each individual slide.”19 Eliminating the menu bar as proscenium breaks the windows
interaction paradigm, leaving no trace of the multiplex desktop environment. The
operating system recedes, the screen becomes the slide, and the audience looks at bullet
points and images that have become architectural because they are conveyed at the scale
of the space.
The only way to display multiple slides, and therefore to make visual arguments less
dependent on sequence, is to project in production mode. Doing so, however, also reveals
speaker notes, underlined misspellings, and the associated mess of backstage work. This
rarely occurs. Even where existing functionalities make alternative narrative strategies
possible, the strong distinctions between views intervenes. For example, the box-shaped
selection tool that allows speakers to select a portion of the slide for public display is
hidden from the audience. What could have been a zooming tool animating a procedure for
relating parts to wholes is rendered as yet another cut to yet another slide. The audience
misses the analytical move of animated magnification and the logic of an interaction
technique. Imagine if presentation mode showed both the magnified selection and a
thumbnail of the full slide in one corner. Moving the box would change the on-screen
content while maintaining a sense of the overall slide design. But re-imagining the slide
sorter or the presentation view would break the unity of the concept undergirding
PowerPoint.
While bullets and chart junk receive the bulk of critical attention the conditioning imposed
by the one slide, one screen paradigm unremarkably persists.
PowerPoint Precursors
That any application has been the subject of so much public discourse is striking but
especially so given that its most defining features predate software entirely. Critics speak
as though Microsoft invented bullet points but of course this isn’t true. Lists are as old as
writing itself and spare language and info-graphics have long been part of corporate
culture. Historian JoAnne Yates has traced the interest in managerial practices that used
communications as means of coordination and control to the emergence of modern
corporations in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Particularly in industries such as
railroads, utilities, and manufacturing, which are characterized by high capital demands,
geographic distribution, and functional diversity, formal internal business communications
became a recognizable genre.20 Business reports were exercises in brevity. Traditional
salutations fell away. Short rather than long lines predominated. Prose was de-prioritized.
Conclusions were often presented first. This is the moment of the memo (as distinct from
the business letter) and the executive summary report. Strict formatting rules about
spacing, language, margins, and the placement of pins and clips turned reports into
exercises in Taylorism, as though efficiency operated not only on bodies and machines but
also at the scale of layout and text.
Alongside the push to rationalize communications came the use of graphics. Prior to the
late nineteenth century graphs in the United States were mostly used for conveying
statistical information like census figures. As multi-divisional corporations consolidated and
standardized performance reports they adopted charts and graphs. Visual, numerical
documents promised to speed information transmission while eliminating the biases and
idiosyncrasies associated with writing style. Charts and graphs relied on the eye as an
organ for rapidly detecting patterns, making comparisons, and detecting relationships
between different data points. Targeted at busy executives, they appeared in reports, on
wall charts, and lantern slides, as methods for coordinating strategic decision-making.
PowerPoint’s inheritance from the lineage of formal internal business communications is
perhaps nowhere more evident than through the information practices at the DuPont
Corporation. Yates traces the culture of gathering around graphics that took root in the
twentieth century.21 Managers held shop conferences for superintendents from various
factories and divisions. By debating the meaning of curves, slumps, and inconsistencies
they adopted consistent practices through comparative work. In the years after World War
I DuPont developed a system called the chart room that bound presentation to executive
control. It was the heart of daily operations for DuPont executives. The chart room
contained hundreds of large images suspended from the ceiling on movable metal frames
that could be re-arranged via a system of tracks and switches adapted from equipment
designed for moving bales of hay. The machinery facilitated comparison, discussion, and a
concern with high-level strategy rather than operational detail. The chart room expressed
and inculcated the ethos of systematic managerialism. It was a proprietary secret for more
than three decades. Once revealed, it became a destination drawing tourists from around
the world.
Figure 6. The Du Pont chart room.
By the second half of twentieth century business presentations were delivered by flip
chart, whiteboard, overhead projector, and 35mm slide. Bullet points, lists, charts, graphs,
text, images, and diagrams were all part of their style. Long before software companies
made presentation programs the genre was relatively stable all over the world.
Presenter: Automating Corporate Presentations
In 1984 Robert Gaskins joined Forethought as part of their corporate restart. Gaskins
hailed from the Palo Alto laboratory for Bell-Northern Research, the largest research and
development operation in Canada. Prior to that he pursued an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in
Computer Science, Linguistics, and English at University of California Berkeley. At the time
Computer Science was still in the College of Letters and Science and Gaskins’ interests in
natural languages, writing systems, and typesetting overlapped naturally with the technical
field. Gaskins’ bio reads like that of a digital humanist.22 As chief programmer at the
Berkeley Machine Translation Project he worked on Chinese-English translation techniques,
typesetting Egyptian hieroglyphics, musical structures, and computer poetry. He co-
authored (with Laura Gould) a Snobol4 textbook for humanists interested in text
manipulation.23
Undergirding these sensibilities was a long personal history with presentations. Gaskins’
father was a prominent member of the National Audio-Visual Association and owned
photographic equipment businesses. Gaskins recalls that “our most memorable family
vacations were every few years when we went to visit the Eastman Kodak Co. in Rochester
NY,” “it was the most established institution of my childhood.”24 At Bell-Northern Gaskins
was steeped in a meeting culture reliant upon overhead transparencies and photographic
slides. When Gaskins, Dennis Austin, and Tom Rudkin began producing the specifications
for Presenter, they used Gaskins’ personal archive of presentations as a corpus for
extracting the key features:
It wasn’t difficult to conclude that (1) a way of constructing “boxes and lines” diagrams
with labels, plus (2) a way of constructing single-level and multi-level bulleted lists, and
(3) a way of combining those freely below a title, together would make it easy to duplicate
almost all the overheads in the corpus.25
Early pitches focused on convincing investors that presentations were already part of
everyday life. Thus the business opportunity was in giving presenters direct control over
content production. The average presenter made about a hundred slides per year (twelve
monthly presentations of eight slides or four quarterly presentations of twenty-five slides)
but rarely used a personal computer.26 International Data Corporation predicted that
although in 1984 only 14 percent of computers were used for presentation graphics by
1989 52 percent of personal computers would be engaged in this form of work. Future
Computing concurred.27 These industry analysts were predicting that a new horizontal
category called ‘presentation software’ would emerge with the spread of graphical
capabilities and they projected that this market would be larger than the market for
spreadsheets.
Presentation capabilities were identified as major factors when considering computer
purchases. This was software selling hardware, a killer app.
Presenter did indeed deliver a concrete reason to upgrade. It was a born-graphical
application initially released as third-party software for Apple and one of the first really
graphically demanding applications for Windows. It was among the first pieces of software
to demonstrate full color use, to utilize the Apple Palette Manager, and to use shaded color
backgrounds and context-sensitive color menus. Even the manuals and marketing
materials were full color, an unheard of practice within the industry at that time. Moreover,
PowerPoint development cycles were timed to release with new versions of operating
systems. In 1990 PowerPoint 2.0 and Windows 3.0 shipped the same day. In 1992
PowerPoint 3.0, the first application designed exclusively for TrueType fonts, shipped
within a month of Windows 3.1. PowerPoint then became a core component of Microsoft
Office.
Presenter was designed to integrate into a range of computing environments. The software
contained only the most rudimentary drawing and text tools. By relying instead on Apple’s
clipboard functionality to import complex objects, images, and charts from other
applications it allowed users to incorporate specialized sources of graphical and data
elements within the same slide. Presenter supported a variety of output devices such as
low-resolution printers, inkjet and laser printers and plotters. Subsequent versions allowed
for modem delivery for the printing and preparation of 35mm slides, and later direct
output to projectors and video displays. That said, the software was designed with the
Apple LaserWriter in mind. The LaserWriter, introduced in 1985, was core to the rise of
desktop publishing because it allowed users to print multiple fonts as well as arbitrary
graphics at relatively high quality in either portrait or landscape orientation.
Initially, Presenter provided a desktop publishing process for creating overhead
transparencies. Transparencies were clear, paper-sized films that could be placed on a
lighted platform and projected onto the wall behind the speaker via a system of mirrors
and lenses suspended from a raised arm. Overhead projectors were endemic to formal and
informal settings for meetings, talks, and classes. Transparencies could be written on with
special pens during a presentation or prepared in advance with handwritten content or
typed text.
Figure 7. Overhead projector.
Making transparencies could be simple and straightforward or laborious and time-
consuming. At Bell-Northern Gaskins became intimately acquainted with the complex
possibilities of making presentation content for overheads. The process began with
employees collaboratively sketching ideas on paper or whiteboard. These initial drafts were
copied by assistants or secretaries, then revised, and then prepared as plain text in a
Unix-based editor like Emacs running on a terminal connected to a PDP11/70. Separate
formatting macros were written in TEX and images were drawn on a separate workstation
via a locally written bitmap editor. Content, image, and formatting files were then
uploaded for post-processing to a DEC-20 where each picture was parsed into character-
sized files and treated as a pseudo-font that TEX would typeset to look like pictures. Once
the program executed, the output was spooled to a Versatec plotter that printed onto a
continuous roll of grainy thermal paper that was automatically sliced into letter-sized
sheets. In case the cutter failed a pair of scissors was tied to the printer with a string. Any
mistakes or revisions meant beginning again. Once output was approved it could then be
transferred to overhead transparencies and its contrast enhanced through photocopying.28
Computer-aided typesetting enforced distinctions between content and formatting.

Presenter, by contrast, allowed users to work with the finished product in real-time.
Presentations consisted of a collection of slides that effectively operated as one-page
documents with separate internal structures. Slides provided a 7.5” x 10” canvas in
portrait or landscape orientation. Each slide was associated with approximately a page of
notes. Presenter allowed users to view one slide at a time, or the entire presentation in
thumbnails. The slide sorter view functioned as a virtual light table, allowing users to re-
arrange slides through drag-and-drop interactions. A special master slide maintained
structural similarity across slides and could be edited to generate presentation-wide
changes in format. Slides copied from one presentation to another automatically
reformatted to the parameters of their new environment. Slide show mode allowed the
content producer to view their presentation in full-screen.29
Figure 8. Original

Presenter interaction flows.
Although initially designed for typesetting overhead transparencies, subsequent releases

targeted the production of photographic slides. Slide presentations were far more difficult
and expensive to prepare than overheads. They required professional photographers,
graphic designers, and the services of corporate art departments or outside bureaus.
Original artwork was photographed on 35mm film then placed in two inch-square mounts
to fit Kodak Carousel projectors. Slide shows were generally in color. They rarely contained
words but might feature soundtracks. Given costs of up to several hundred dollars per
slide they were generally reserved for more formal occasions.
Figure 9. Kodak Carousel 35mm slide projector.
The dominant player in presentation slides was Genigraphics, a spin-off of General Electric
that initially developed flight simulations technologies for NASA. In the 1970s the division
repurposed their equipment to make slides for pitching their services to other government
agencies and then went into the presentation-making business full-time. By 1986
Genigraphics was earning $75 million in revenue annually from their high-end hardware
business and a custom service bureau franchise. Service bureaus were located in major
United States cities and operated twenty-four hours a day 365 days per year. Nearly every
Fortune 500 Company, most federal government agencies (including the military), large
foundations, publishing houses, universities, and advertising agencies used Genigraphics.
Some corporations had Genigraphics departments where in-house artists worked on
Genigraphics machines.
Genigraphics slides were assembled through a mixture of photographic and computational
processes. Highly skilled operators worked at custom consoles equipped with a full-color
CRT monitor, solid-state raster display hardware, a keyboard, two joysticks, five rate
knobs, pushbuttons, and switches. Operators entered graphics parameters, coordinates,
and vector-based artwork while drawing the graphic by dropping the vertices on-screen
into a pink wireframe. Fill colors and borders were then plotted and background colors
gradated to produce a smooth effect. The graphics processor was a 16-bit minicomputer
that could store programs or save artwork and send the images to a high-resolution
recorder consisting of a 4000 line monochromatic CRT, a six-sector color wheel, a 35mm
camera, and image control circuitry.30 It took about two minutes to render a 2000 line
resolution slide.
Figure 10. Genigraphics console.
By the late 1980s Genigraphics was interested in accepting business via personal
computers. Forethought, now Microsoft’s Graphics Business Unit (GBU), was keen to learn
from Genigraphics’ domain expertise. At MacWorld 1988 the companies announced their
partnership. PowerPoint files could be transmitted directly to service bureaus and the
companies would conduct joint sales calls on all corporate accounts.
It would be hard to overestimate Genigraphics’ influence on PowerPoint. PowerPoint 2.0
was designed for Genigraphics film recorders. It shipped with Genigraphics color palettes,
schemes, and the distinctively Genigraphics color-gradient backgrounds. The application
contained a ‘Send to Genigraphics’ menu item that wrote the presentation to floppy disk or
transmitted the order directly via modem. Within three and a half months PowerPoint
orders accounted for ten percent of revenue at Genigraphics service centers.
PowerPoint 3.0 was even more intimately dependent upon Genigraphics. The software
incorporated a collection of clip art images and symbols that had been produced by
hundreds of artists at dozens of service centers across tens of thousands of presentations.
Genigraphics artists designed PowerPoint 3.0 colors, templates, and sample presentations.
The software even used Genigraphics (rather than Excel) chart style. Bar charts were
rendered two-dimensionally with apparent thickness added to make them seemingly
recede from the axes. The technique made it easier for viewers to compare bar heights
and estimate values from axis ticks and labels. Pie charts were handled analogously.
Microsoft paid Genigraphics to produce more than 500 clip art drawings and symbols used
in Microsoft programs.31 In 1989, after three years of flat revenue, Genigraphics sold its
hardware business. By 1991 Genigraphics has created over 700,000 slides for more than
7000 customers. Genigraphics drivers continued shipping in PowerPoint boxes until 2003.
Once laptops with VGA connections became commercially viable, distinctions between
productions streams for overheads, slides, and multimedia presentations effectively
collapsed. Gone were the secretaries, artists, outside agencies and audio-visual providers
once key to each of these processes. So too, presentation formats and styles gradually
became less distinct.
Presentation Culture
The bulk of PowerPoint criticism has focused on the genre’s inadequacy as compared to
essays, papers, and reports. Slide decks do, however, possess their own interesting
properties as documents. Their modularity allows them to be generated as piles and then
later assembled into a narrative order.
They can be single or multi-authored, can structure a range of outputs, and can be easily
revised, re-shuffled, and re-used. Their virtues as a flexible authoring platform are well-
suited to the demands of the modern corporation. Slide decks coordinate, collate,
document, and report on the work of heterogeneous actors in different groups, across
different sites, and at a range of organizational levels. They travel vertically and laterally,
both inside and outside the firm. In many ways PowerPoint files exceed classification as
documents to become what Yates and Orlikowski refer to as a “genre in use,” or structures
that determine norms but do not wholly constrain social practices.32 They are platforms,
repositories, and archives, serving to propose visions, structure agreements, and
document work. Nevertheless, the software’s primary value comes less from distributed
co-authoring than from an individual’s speech.
PowerPoint files can be read as documents but more often they are performed. Meetings
are amongst the most time-consuming activities knowledge workers engage in and
PowerPoint has done much to establish presentation as a dominant form of organizational
work. PowerPoint may not have invented presentation styles but it certainly scaled up
presentation culture. It would be hard to argue that the average presentation contains as
much information as the average memo. Clearly slideware is about something else. Slides
bind knowledge to performance rather than to representation. They are not designed to
provide audiences with evidence that speaks for itself. Here, they diverge from the
document as text.
The tight interdependencies of information, technology, and speech become most apparent
in moments of breakdown and failure. Meetings without properly formatted slides cannot
take place. Computer failures prevent speakers from talking about what they want to talk
about. Students refuse to recognize the legitimacy of lecture content unaccompanied by
slides. Even within functioning presentations, subtle cues signal that visuals and speech
are bound into a common rhetorical object. Sociologist Hubert Knoblauch has focused on
gestural coordinating of verbal content with on-screen images. Whether by hand, mouse,
or pointer, the indexical move signifies that pictures do not stand alone.33 The speaker,
decentered by the screen, enacts a “multimodal discourse” characterized by “two
paradoxical patterns in discourse structure, a linear pattern in time, a sequential rhythm to
discourse, and a non-linear pattern in space, a constellation of signs and symbols in three-
dimensional space.”34 Multimodal discourse requires choreography, compositionality, ways
of deciding how meaning ought to emerge from different channels, how they stand in
relation, how audiences experience gestalt. There is a tremendous dependence upon not
just knowledge production but also knowledge performance, or virtuosity.
Rich Gold, manager of the Research in Experimental Documents group at Xerox PARC and
self-proclaimed PowerPoint maestro, characterized presentations as jazz. Slides are merely
the starting point, the “bass rhythm, and chord changes over which the melody is
improvised.”35 Presenters are expected to enact a special form of reading called ‘the
gloss,’ a real-time explanation of the writing on the wall. Reading from notes or slides
violates the expectation that a speaker can lay it down fresh every time, connecting with
the group around a commonly held artifact. In great talks the visual and auditory channels
seem to merge. Ideas and images lock together and meaning becomes thick and layered.
The audience and speaker achieve collective effervescence through mutual flow, and
listeners experience a sense of accelerated thinking as they improvise like the clarinet over
sax, one octave up.36
For Gold, PowerPoint signaled an important transformation in organizational reading.
Nineteenth century genres were falling by the wayside: “I don’t know if the novel is dead,
but the memo certainly is. In its place rises the slide.”37 One can’t help but hear an
uncanny echo and inversion of Victor Hugo’s claim that “the Printing Press will destroy the
Church.” Gold, like every other medium theorist from Elizabeth Eisenstein and Walter Ong
to Harold Innis and Marshall McLuhan, was arguing that a new mode of cultural expression
(read: media) was transforming society and its institutional forms.38 Print may have
materialized the Protestant Reformation but slideware brought bibliographic culture back to
wall reading. Modern corporations, once comprised of document-reading individuals, now
relied on co-located groups reading epigraphically. By turning distributed readerships into
collective beholding, personal computing brought a theatrical quality to organizational life.
That slideware has been overlooked in software studies and by digital humanists reveals a
general tendency to think through analytic frameworks derived from text. Digital formats
have prompted conversations about the status of copyright, authorship, and the role of
design and interactivity in the construction of meaning, but scholars continue to presume
readerly modes of reception and use. By privileging cases of individuals networked via
personal (private) devices, analysts treat software systems like reading publics. Even
those who advocate taking social networking sites, wikis, blogs, virtual worlds, and
databases seriously presume the distributed sociality characteristic of bibliographic culture.
Presentation culture is a powerful reminder that before Gutenberg much reading was
listening and that some of the most important contributions of computing have little to do
with personal use. As Walter Ong points out, it can be exceedingly difficult for members of
a literate society to think in terms of collective reading, “There is no collective noun or
concept for readers corresponding to ‘audience.’ The collective ‘readership’ – this magazine
has a readership of two million – is a far-gone abstraction. To think of readers as a united
group, we have to fall back on calling them as an ‘audience’ as though they were in fact
listeners.”39 Thinking about personal computing as wall reading means regarding digital
media situationally and socially, as acquiring meaning through ritual and performative
means. It means focusing on what knowledge does, who participates in its formation, and
how it relies on social structures to achieve its effects.
In epigraphic culture slideware makes sense. Slides don’t perform to the standards of the
essay or report because information transmission is not what is at stake. “In the sweaty
hormone-steeped conference room, when all eyes are on the PowerPoint presenter with his
or her slides dissolving from one to the next, the emphasis is on group, consensus, team,
collaboration, compromise, unity.”40 It’s about “the war dance that inspires the fighting
power of a tribe.”41 Question and answer sessions aren’t primarily about eliciting
information. They are ritual means of determining whether or not the speaker is a member
of the group (anyone who has endured an academic job talk knows this only too well).
Presentations are a form of knowing highly dependent on the architectural conditions of
reception, an implicit recognition that what we know, how we know it, and what we are
willing to entertain depends on who we are with.
Sarah Kaplan, extending the work of Karen Knorr-Cetina, characterizes PowerPoint as the
“epistemic machinery” for project-driven organizations.42 It provides an ideal apparatus
for producing and legitimating strategic discourse. This specific form of knowledge work is
particularly suited to contingent worlds of heterogeneous stakeholders where the survival
of the firm is always apparently at stake. Progress is measured in the number of meetings
attended, slides generated, and charts reviewed rather than in analytic quality. Experts are
presentation adepts capable of setting agendas, structuring discussions, and
demonstrating strategic ideas through the materiality of the slide. They are able to
embody and perform constantly changing, distributed knowledge, to create a sense of
order when none might be present, and to anchor discussions by narrating abstract images
in view.43
Franck Frommer argues that PowerPoint is an ideological apparatus that has allowed
decentralized organizations to discipline knowledge workers. As bureaucratic corporations
gave way to liberated firms, project-oriented, entrepreneurial extroverts became the
favored kind of employee. These individuals, marked by their ease in precarious conditions
and networked worlds, imagine themselves as creative and free. For them, work is neither
job nor calling, but rather a site for personal growth.44 Presentations, a form of work once
reserved for the managerial few, became performance opportunities for the many,
moments of personal expression where individuals could gain attention and approbation by
demonstrating the capacity to communicate, adapt, and shine.
These seemingly voluntary forms of expression provide employees with countless
opportunities to subject themselves to the judgments of others. Presentations are a mode
of address that doubles as an auditing method. The characteristically neutral language of
presentations can make one feel implacable, unassailable, like wearing a suit. Ironically,
these opportunities for personal expression rely on atomized collections of disconnected
phrases lacking logical transitions or definite meaning. It is here that the interpellation of
the new worker occurs. Presentations generate unification between speaker and
organization precisely because the format relies on the orator’s talent for bringing forward
key concepts in spectacular terms to create a sense that everything connects. They are a
medium for channeling charisma through institutional means. PowerPoint style arms the
speaker with pre-scripted forms of authoritative speech – nominalizations, indefinite
articles, infinitives, elisions – and martial references – tactics, strategies, roadmaps – to
generate agreement with strategic discourse.45 It is no coincidence that PowerPoint’s
sample presentation included in the very first version in 1987 was of Christopher Columbus
convincing the Spanish monarchs to fund his venture to the new world.46

Figure 11. Christopher Columbus PowerPoint presentation.
There is perhaps no more tragic case of interpellation than Colin Powell’s 2003 United
Nations presentation on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The only member of the
cabinet that seemed capable of doubting the logics of the Bush regime became the front
man charged with convincing an international public to go to war. Powell’s performance
echoed Adlai Stevenson’s 1962 flip-chart presentation delivered in same room during the
Cuban Missile Crisis. Stevenson showed a series of aerial photographs and maps that he
interpreted as undeniable proof of Soviet missiles in Cuban territory.47 Powell exploited
PowerPoint’s ability to weave text, audio recordings, images, and videos into “an
accumulation of facts” that demonstrated his government’s powers of surveillance.48
Figure 12. Colin Powell’s PowerPoint presentation to the United Nations Security Council.
David Stark and Verena Paravel have used the Powell case to argue that PowerPoint’s
capacity to re-present materials gathered and produced elsewhere in front of eye-
witnesses signals a dramatic transformation in the “geography of persuasion.”49 As
presentations become privileged forms of speech politics becomes entangled with the
affordances of a software package. The consequences of achieving authority through an
“accumulation of facts” are being increasingly felt in a range of institutional contexts. By
2015, for example, eleven criminal convictions had been overturned in United States
appellate courts based on prosecutors’ egregious misuses of PowerPoint.50 Where Stark
and Paravel preserve a note of optimism by hoping that digital technologies will allow
counter-demonstrations to emerge online we are more cautious. The very materiality of
slideware guarantees that even oppositional decks are comprised of just one damn slide
after another.
Slide-by-Slide: Art History and Double Slide Projection
Things could be otherwise. In fact, they have been. Consider art history, a discipline
uniquely forged through a fusion of projection technologies with speech. Prior to the late
nineteenth century adoption of photographic slides art lecturers relied on the audiences’
familiarity with works, perhaps from a Grand Tour, or they employed props like drawings,
woodcuts, casts, or models. Speech was characterized by rhetorical techniques such as
ekphrasis that rendered artwork present through verbal transmissions and personal
response. With the widespread availability of photographic slides, art history transformed.
Lecturers were not only able to reach larger audiences and broader publics they also began
claiming a new status as scientific authorities. Photographs provided visual evidence, a
form of data for the discipline. Magic lanterns transformed lecture halls and classrooms
into privileged sites for observation and analysis. As instruments for public viewing,
projection technologies allowed art historians to claim what Lorraine Daston and Peter
Galison have called “the epistemic virtue” of objectivity.51
Art historians grounded technological expertise in image-dependent orality. They adopted
rhetorical strategies for stressing the common space-time of speaker, audience, and
artwork. Slides were treated as art objects themselves rather than photographs of art
objects. Lecturers moved back and forth between direct observations, critical analysis, and
historical detail, pulling the audience along as collective witnesses of demonstrable facts.
The lit images in darkened rooms helped coordinate the audiences’ vision, facilitating a
sense of intimacy, as lecturers braided arguments and collective beholding into a common
performative frame. In the process, audience members became modern spectators trained
to confirm art historical interpretations of the meanings of slides.
Mature art historians are distinguished by their comfort with slides. They are masters of
exposition as beholding. Multiple art historians have written about Heinrich Wölfflin as
exemplary and influential within the tradition of the lecture. They say he began by
considering images in silence, fixing his gaze upon them as though seeing them for the
first time. His silence generated an atmosphere of reverence, a sense of expectation, a
feeling that the artwork was coming into presence within the scene. Wölfflin began slowly
with what Robert Nelson describes as “hesitancy that seems more appropriate for a séance
than a classroom.”52 Wölfflin’s identification with the image became so complete that
eventually any deictics fell away “making it seem as if ancient statues, whether male or
female, possessed deep, rich, German-accented voices.”53 Together, his voice, gaze, and
presentation technology confirmed the status of the artwork. A generation of students
absorbed his mannerisms, imitating his pauses in speech and his solemn affect.
Wölfflin invented dual-slide projection. He considered juxtaposition the fundamental

analytic technique of the art historian. Displaying two separate images at a time allowed
the lecturer to contextualize, compare, and explore variations. It allowed the art historian
to produce objective readings by hypothesizing, observing relationships between parts and
wholes, producing taxonomic classifications, and by verifying visual arguments in public
settings. By using a ‘Grundakkord’ or anchor slide returned to over and again he could
digress and maintain a central narrative. Of course the technical-analytic assemblage of
the art history lecture is not without its problematic politics. The very emphasis on
systematic comparisons that are mediated (unacknowledged) through the materiality of
the photographic slide legitimates a form of visuality in which objects from very different
cultural and historical conditions can be positioned side by side for the purposes of expert
comparison.
Beyond PowerPoint
Double slide projection is just one example of how conceptual grounding manifests through
infrastructure. If a conceptual foundation changes, the infrastructure may not necessarily
be adequate, and if the infrastructure changes, the concept may shift as well. Slideware
works because a concept and infrastructure have stabilized around a concern with single
screens and serial arguments. Of course PowerPoint can show two images at once (albeit
at reduced size) but duality on a single screen is not the same as two separate screens.
The difference is in more than just the framing. Single centralized displays shape reception
differently than distributed multi-display environments.54 As multi-screen environments
and large online repositories proliferate and as critical scholars take up digital platforms,
the limits of slideware should become increasingly apparent. PowerPoint will not be
replaced, but its ubiquity may be challenged in the long-term. Moving beyond PowerPoint
requires thinking about both the concepts and infrastructures undergirding occasions for
speech.
For more than a decade the Umeå University HUMlab has been re-imagining
infrastructures for critical humanistic inquiry and digital scholarship. In 2015 the lab added
a display studio explicitly designed to challenge the default architecture of presentation.
Rather than including a single, central, state-of-the-art, high-resolution screen,
researchers implemented a non-symmetric, two-screen arrangement for stereo projection.
The angled setup is central. The right hand-screen is vertically oriented, requiring two
projectors tilted sideways. Differently shaped screens allow presenters to provide different
vantages on the same information, with attention to the disjunctures between these
visions. Imagine, for example, a three-dimensional model of the Colosseum on the left
hand screen and a portal to the data underlying the rendering on the right.
Figure 13. HUMlab display studio.
PowerPoint does not work in the display studio. For that matter, neither does Keynote,
Google Slides, or Prezi. The two-screen architecture prevents it. Using the space requires
stepping out of default modes of presentation to consider alternative strategies for
multimodal discourse. Although the display studio as epistemic machinery will likely prove
better for certain forms of research over others, the sheer deviation from the dominant
paradigm constitutes a critical resource. When architecture becomes designed around a
single presentation format there are no alternatives in software. Asking for other
architectures, however, opens anew the conceptual-material possibilities for knowledge
production. PowerPoint enacted only one such possibility but many others are waiting to be
imagined and designed. HUMlab researchers have recently begun developing presentation
authoring software for multi-screen ecologies.
Conclusion
PowerPoint is not a slide projector without a slide tray. It is not a neutral automation of
existing processes. It is a part of visual culture, an increasingly everyday experience at
every kind of occasion for speech. In 1991 the Graphics Business Unit of Microsoft
(formerly Forethought Inc.) built their conference room with rear projection, a custom
podium, concealed power supplies, and networking and teleconferencing connections. They
were prototyping the future, imagining a world of U-shaped rather than oval conference
tables, where slideware rather than documents predominated. Today it would be unusual
to find a meeting room that doesn’t presume slideware. PowerPoint colonized wall reading
and it changed the very walls. We have yet to document the histories and effects of this
transformation.
Figure 14. The Graphics Business Unit conference room.
PowerPoint is just one example of the oft-overlooked conditioning of knowledge
production. The software profoundly shaped basic social expectations, technical conditions,
and architectural pre-requisites for speech yet it was uncritically absorbed in nearly every
quarter. PowerPoint does not zoom. It does not allow spontaneous comparisons. It does
not accommodate several screens, multiple threads, or distributed live collaborations. It
makes the analytic move of systematic comparison, so prevalent in late nineteenth and
early twentieth century information presentations, extremely difficult to make. Moreover,
its expansion has meant that once distinct situations have become more alike. Meetings,
sermons, lectures, and talks increasingly employ the technics of commercial
demonstration. Twenty-first century occasions for speech are structured by a platform that
enforces the paradigm of one-slide-at-a-time.
Knowledge infrastructures were not always already present in some precise configuration.
They are cultural works, constantly constructed, reified, and transformed. Thus, knowledge
work contains expressive possibilities, means of conveying the sensations of new logics as
they emerge. Admittedly PowerPoint possesses the virtue of ubiquity. Nevertheless, critical
scholars might do well to imagine new compositions formats. Doing so will inevitably
complicate the media ecology but it will also force us to decide which modes of speech
disciplines want. Perhaps knowledge need not be copied, templated, or distributed in a
common form. Perhaps idiosyncrasy and specificity are resources as well. Triptychs,
expanded cinema, and installations may not easily port to the web but like playing a violin
at Carnegie Hall or in a Gothic cathedral or a subway tunnel, they may serve as
demonstrations that engaging with the specificities of local infrastructures is a difference
that makes a difference. There are performative dimensions to knowledge transmission
and material specificities in the relationships between form and content.
In an essay on the seeming inevitability of Moore’s Law, computer historian Paul Ceruzzi
closes with a trenchant reminder that “we pass critical and moral judgment on Harry
Truman for his decision to use atomic bombs against Japan, we criticize a museum for
showing, out of context, the aircraft that carried the first bomb, yet we ignore our ability to
exert more than a smidgen of control over technologies that affect – determine – our daily
lives.”55 Scholars argue against technological determinism while ceding daily interactions
to the push of engineering. By critiquing, contextualizing, and defining everyday processes
of production we might recognize tools as concepts that foreground analytics. We might
design to support dialogue, deliberation, and multiple points of view. Doing so might mean
we have more and different things to say at every occasion for speech.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Johanna Drucker, Robert Gaskins, Lisa Gitelman, and
Carlin Wing, all generous readers of early drafts.
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Notes
http://news.microsoft.com/2012/07/19/microsoft-reports-record-fourth-quarter-and-full-
year-revenue/. ↩
Gaskins, Sweating Bullets, 426-427. ↩
There are notable efforts underway to bring about an ‘everyday turn’ in software studies,
see Matthew Kirschenbaum’s project on Word Processing, or Davison, “Because of the
Pixels.” ↩
Drucker and Svensson, “The Why and How of Middleware.” ↩
Gaskins, ibid., 405. ↩
Bumiller, “We Have Met the Enemy.” ↩
Ibid. ↩
Kaplan, “The End of History.” ↩
Jaffe, “What’s Your Point, Lieutenant?” ↩
Bumiller, ibid. ↩
Crean, “Hypnotizing Chickens.” ↩
Tufte,”PowerPoint is Evil.” ↩
Ibid. ↩
Ibid. ↩
Columbia Accident Investigation Board Report, 191. ↩
Frommer, How PowerPoint Makes You Stupid, 228. ↩
Byrne, “Learning to Love PowerPoint.” ↩
Lanier, Constructing the Ultimate PowerPoint, 4. ↩
Austin, Rudkin, and Gaskins. Presenter Specification, 24. ↩
Yates, Control through Communication. ↩
See ibid., and Yates, “Graphs as a Managerial Tool.” ↩
Gaskins’ consistently literary bent contributes to this impression. PowerPoint was the first
software application to ship with a hardbound book as its manual. His 500+ page self-
published reflection on presentation software is replete with literary allusions to figures like
Samuel Johnson. ↩
Snobol was authored by Paul McJones and Charles Simonyi. Simonyi later co-invented
Bravo, the first word processing software, at Xerox PARC and then Word at Microsoft. ↩
Ibid., 89. ↩
Ibid., 77. ↩
Gaskins, Product Marketing Analysis, 11. ↩
Gaskins, Sweating Bullets, 31. ↩
Presenter obscured the Apple menu bar when in full-screen mode, thus violating the
interface rules and breaking out of the windowing environment. ↩
Moreland, “Computer-generated Stereograms.” ↩
Yates and Orlikowski. “The PowerPoint Presentation and Its Corollaries.” ↩
Knoblauch, “The Performance of Knowledge.” ↩
Bucher and Niemann, “Visualizing Science”, 283. ↩
Gold, “Reading PowerPoint”, 264. ↩
Ibid., 265. ↩
Ibid., 258. ↩
See for example Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, Ong, Orality and
Literacy, Innis, Empire and Communications, McLuhan, Understanding Media. ↩
Ong, ibid, 74. ↩
Gold, ibid., 260. ↩
Gold, ibid., 261-262. ↩
Kaplan, “Strategy and PowerPoint.” ↩
Yakura, “Visualizing an Information Technology Project.” ↩
On the suturing on bohemian styles with knowledge work, see Turner, “Burning Man at
Google.” ↩
Similar syntactical tendencies are documented in Moretti and Pestre, “Bankspeak.” ↩
Gaskins credits the idea of the Christopher Columbus presentation to Henry Boettinger’s
1969 book on presentations, Moving Mountains. ↩
Stark and Paravel, “PowerPoint in Public.” ↩
Powell, Iraq: Failing to Disarm. ↩
Stark and Paravel, ibid., 34. ↩
Armstrong, “Next Slide Please.” ↩
Daston and Galison, Objectivity. ↩
Nelson, “The Slide Lecture.” ↩
Ibid., 419. ↩
Robles, Nass, and Kahn, “The Social Life of Information Displays.” ↩
Ceruzzi, “Moore’s Law and Technological Determinism”, 587-588. ↩
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