Roblog

Edward Tufte at his searing best, dismantling the cult of PowerPoint. PowerPoint is, to Tufte, a singularly useless form of communication: slow, shallow, and thought-corrupting. He uses the tragic example of the Columbia space shuttle disaster to demonstrate the real dangers of reducing complex issues to bullet points.

“Imagine a widely used and expensive prescription drug that claimed to make us beautiful but didn’t. Instead the drug had frequent, serious side effects: making us stupid, degrading the quality and credibility of our communication, turning us into bores, wasting our colleagues’ time. These side effects, and the resulting unsatisfactory cost/benefit ratio, would rightly lead to a worldwide product recall.”