Scientific findings should be replicated somewhere other than PowerPoint
Marketers too readily accept and share the findings of behavioural ‘science’, when they should be demanding the sources and challenging the contexts.
Dennis Robert Austin, who died earlier this month, was famous – or infamous, depending on your viewpoint – for creating PowerPoint. Since its debut in 1987, the system has contrived to combine ubiquity with disdain – with even those who lament its banality succumbing to its ease of use.
Occasionally, the critique has taken on a societal significance; at a conference in 2010 a four-star US general laid into the burgeoning use of PowerPoint in the military with the assertion that “it makes us look stupid”. This is like blaming Tim Berners-Lee for the sidebar of shame. The medium is not the message.
