Page 36 - Cyberculture and New Media

Francisco J. Ricardo 27
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Figure 3. A Microsoft PowerPoint™ Slide
There is no hyperbole in asserting that the cultural unconsciousness
of modernity harbours historically engendered motivations toward one
particular kind of literacy. The form of linear thought whose logic is based on
gradual development of theme or idea from context to climax begins in the
educational requirement, taught for centuries and passed into the legacy of
the literate scribe and scholar, that the young pupil of ancient Greece
command classical logic’s syllogistic structures and manoeuvre classical
rhetoric’s five-point techné. Modern deviations from this path, therefore, are
bound to have dramatic impact. In particular, the displacement of theme-
centred thinking by point-driven media introduces particular economies of
language that reduce the archetypal expressive unit, the sentence, to a quasi-
outmoded artefact rarely seen in these new forms. Drawings and diagrams are
not new, but their prevalence as a substitute for writing mark a turning point
of sorts. Point-driven writing, manifest even more emphatically in the bullet
list, shifts the emphasis from style to process, seeking to communicate some
kind of how in what is presented, and if judged only through its insistent
visuality, renders the written form nearly gratuitous. Predictably, this
alteration has attracted numerous lines of critique. There are some for whom
the historically evolved forms of textual expression fulfil conditions of
understanding that are not attainable merely with points, glyphs, or graphs,
and others for whom the comparison between topical and point-driven media
is not necessary, for each is its own class of communicative tool. A vexed
Edward Tufte, whose background is statistical rather than literary, finds these
non-manuscript forms paralysed to natural exposition or fertile idea
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development . Narrowing on the particularly problematic category of
presentation software, he associates the characteristic cascade of bullet
points, garish mastheads with oversized, condescendingly obvious graphics,
and distracting animations typical of its “texts” with the jarring, disconcerting
experience devoid ample explanation, which is to say that Tufte traces the
semantic disparity between seeing and reading. Conversely, a more
exploratory construal of the problem is rendered by David Byrne, who,
speaking as visual artist-critic, begins with parody by “making fun of the