A Thousand PowerPoint(less)s of Light?

Some interesting ideas at the IA Think blog on PowerPoint and Idea Development including the often linked (and still a riot) PowerPoint version of the Gettysburg address.

But this post is not just another lambast at the results sometimes called “no power and no point”– the author has a valid wonder about the value of thinking only by bullet points:

In my experience PowerPoint bullets are often authored in leu of written narrative. That is, rather than writing a report and summarizing key points using PowerPoint, PowerPoint is the report. A question, I think, that is raise by this: Does reliance on bullet points (over written narrative) lead to less idea development?

Hence the rise of the weblog, where while the appearance is sometimes the focus, it is usually on the writing, the ideas, the connections between them, and the power of one individual to reach a wider audience (wider than those dozing off in the darkened room of the Powerpoint theater).

It is rather refreshing to have an emphasis on the written form. Edward Abbey would have blasted away a river of searing, biting sarcasm at technology and those attached to it (a common fallacy is taking hos words literally), but his ideas on writing, to me, answer partly, “why we blog”:

But maybe there is something a little better. We write in order to share, for one thing– to share ideas, discoveries, emotions. Alone, we are close to nothing. In prolonged solitude, as I’ve discovered, we come very close to nothingness. Too close for comfort.

Throught the art of language, most inevitable of thr arts– for what is more basic to our humanity than language?– we communicate to others what would be intolerable to bear alone… We write to record the truth… to keep the record straight.

Maybe Mr Clippy has a weblog?

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