Not Waving but Drowning: A Review of Tufte's "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint"
Brian D. Kangas · International journal on teaching and learning in higher education · 2012
The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint: Pitching Out Corrupts Within by Edward Tufte (2006) condemns the software for failing to help users achieve many of the goals of an effective presentation and instead offers a low resolution platform with a deeply hierarchical single-path structure capable of convening a trivial amount of information even over extended periods of time. A summary of his main objections, paired with a Whorfian perspective of how linguistic structure can influence thought, highlights how this ubiquitous yet largely unexamined technology, deeply intertwined with our educational system especially at the collegiate level, must be empirically evaluated relative to potential alternatives and supplements.