Orwell and the Power Point
A few days ago, trying to read a Power Point document that I had received, I did not understand anything, I was not even able to connect the arguments that were presented to me, there were tables with numbers that were not explained, acronyms that I did not know what they meant, even euphemisms that I noticed were masking a different reality … have you ever experienced the same feeling?
Suddenly the book 1984 by George Orwell came to mind.
1984 must be one of the most cited classic books, but, I think, least read. I had read it years ago, but these days I took the opportunity to remember some of its most brilliant passages.
Its Appendix “The Principles of Newspeak”. Newspeak was the official language of Oceania, the fictional intercontinental totalitarian state where the novel takes place. The intention of Newspeak, according to Orwell, was “not only to provide a means of expression for the worldview and mental habits of the devotees of IngSoc (ideology of the also fictitious ruling party in Oceania), but also to make other forms of thought impossible ”.
His vocabulary was constructed in such a way as to give the exact and sometimes very subtle expression to every meaning that the inhabitants of Oceania wanted to express. For example, the word “free” existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in statements such as “this dog is lice free” and the like. It couldn’t be used in its old sense of politically free or intellectually free.
The purpose of Newspeak was to reduce, whenever possible, the words in its vocabulary, since in this way, the smaller the area to choose from, the smaller the temptation to think.
I am not going to go into details, for that I recommend reading this Appendix, but Newspeak has three types of vocabulary, A for words of everyday use, B contained words deliberately constructed for political purposes and finally C, which contained technical words and scientific.
Newspeak grammar had several peculiarities, but one is striking: any word could be used as a verb, noun, adjective or adverb. This rule actually meant the destruction of many words. For example, the word “thought” did not exist, in its place there was “think”, which served as a verb and a noun.
In vocabulary B, for political words, in all cases they were compound words, with an additional objective: to impose a desirable mental attitude on the person who used them. The most famous of all was “doublethink”. According to Orwell, doublethink means “power, the ability to hold two contradictory opinions simultaneously, two contrary beliefs held simultaneously in the mind.”
Doublethinking is ingrained at the very heart of IngSoc. Orwell says: “Telling lies while sincerely believing in them, forgetting any fact that should not be remembered, and then, when it is necessary, remove it from oblivion only for the time that is convenient, and finally deny the existence of the objective reality without leaving for a moment to know that this reality that is denied exists ”.
Many words in Newspeak were euphemisms: joycamp (forced labor camp), Minipax (Ministry of Peace, that is, Ministry of War) or Ministry of Abundance (managed the scarcity of everything).
In vocabulary C, dedicated to science, any scientist could find all the necessary words in the list dedicated to his speciality, but he only had a minimal idea of the words in other lists. Very few words were common to all the lists.
I returned to the power point document I was holding and a chill began to run through my body: I began to see euphemisms, use of verbs instead of nouns, a very subtle use of doublethink, as well as a tremendous profusion of lists (in bullet points) that reminded me of Newspeak.
I took my temperature, but I had no fever. So I decided to do some research, and came across a book that has changed the way I’m going to look at power point documents from now on. It’s called “How power point makes you stupid”, written by Franck Frommer (published in 12).
The book is a well-documented essay on the history of how large corporations managed to make graphic & visual presentations. Power its arguments with anthropological and philosophical points of view that enrich and help you really understand the main message.
Around 1910, especially in the United States, companies grew exponentially, in a multidivisional way (they had all functions integrated: design, production, distribution) but with autonomous branches of activity. These more autonomous organisations had to have some means of sharing data, and comparing themselves. The graphic presentations turned out to have the capacity to help the members of the Board make better decisions.
It all started at the Dupont company in 1919. There, next to the room where the members of the Executive Committee met, they set up an adjoining room, which they called the War Room, where they exhibited 350 graphics, which were periodically updated. The heads of each Division were waiting to be called if any member of the Committee saw anomalies in any of these graphs.
Here I make a jump in history, to focus on what interests me. In the ’80s, there was a turning point in the organisational structure of large corporations: from strict hierarchy to “horizontal” organisations, from authority to autonomy and from “order and command” to encourage creativity. Companies began to bet on project management methods, which meant fostering discussion, exchange, meetings, etc.
For this reason, the Power Point quickly became, in the summer of 1992, the indispensable tool to carry out these projects.
But why does Frommer argue that PowerPoint makes us stupids? Although at the end of the book he recognises that the title is a bit ironic (the sentence is not his, but General James Mattis, who pronounced it before the American military establishment to warn about the blind use that Military was giving to that tool, promoting the execution of projects without critical thinking),
Frommer’s argument is that Power Point forces us ( because of the necessary and damned gains in efficiency) to build a document with a series of limitations that leads to simplify sentences, use limited syntactic forms, and offers a series of discursive procedures (for example, lists) that ultimately make the form prevail over the background, making impossible the normal narrative flow of a discussion and eliminating the possibility of identify the causes and the consequences of the issues analysed.
Frommer explains that the success of PowerPoint, clearly driven by consultants, derives from the fact that it allows to demonstrate the creative talent of the person producing it, their ability to present an argument, shape it, justify its usefulness in the role (or sell a project) and above all, continue to be useful to the organisation. It is a material to be sold, to shine in front of others, to assert your performance.
From their first appearance, Power Point presentations were lists of text with words in large size and barely illustrated with graphs and tables. But this is still true today, where 80–90% of ppt is text.
Even in the Power Point manuals the only thing that is explained are problems of formats, graphics, hierarchies, line spacing, direction of the arrow … but never problems related to speech, syntax or lexicon: how to organise a speech, how to title it, how to build an argument that makes sense. It is assumed that anyone knows how to write and construct an argument.
With a facade of apparent neutrality, power point language excessively uses infinitive verbs, which allows to give the image of command: promote, rationalise, build, develop, deploy.
In short, the ppt allows a speaker to be proud of his ppt, but offering an institutional discourse void of content, on which it is also difficult to draw conclusions for agile decision making.
Bullet point, a key danger tool
The main pillar of the ppt is the bullet point. The use of lists is something characteristic from the earliest forms of writing. Making a list has the connotation of separating, reducing, simplifying. The list makes the information more visible, but also more abstract. It is just the opposite of giving continuity to a reasoning, connecting several discursive elements, typical of a conversation.
The ppt vocabulary in general is reduced to a dozen words taken from the financial world, abusing the euphemism, ellipsis, acronyms and abbreviations, and globish (simplified version of English, which only contains 1500 words to build only the sentences more common).
The ppt also encourages the use of some grammatical peculiarities, such as nominalization, that is, changing a sentence by transforming the verb into a noun or an adjective, which allows cutting sentences, for example: “Economic growth will be slow” in ppt would be: “Slow growth”
But the big problem with lists is that they destroy an element that should be at the heart of any presentation: the logical sequence and the coherent argument. This restricts the capacity for continuous thought and makes it difficult for an argument to emerge smoothly.
Let’s look at three generic bullet point elements that could well be part of any corporate presentation:
- Increase market share by 25%
- Increase profits by 30%
- Increase the introduction of new products to 10 per year.
How would you understand it? There is no way to infer causality. How are the elements connected? The risk of misunderstanding this sequence is high: if we increase market share, will we increase profits? And then with greater benefits we will launch more products? Or is the other way round?
Edward Tufte, a professor at Yale, has shown that the format imposed by the ppt contributed greatly to the 2003 Columbia shuttle disaster, which disintegrated with all 7 crew members on board as it reentered the atmosphere.
The accident investigation concluded that 82 seconds after launch, a 760 gram piece of foam insulation was released. Engineers had detected such problems long before and reported to NASA, but management always decided to go ahead with the mission.
Tufte concluded that all the reports were prepared in power point, and that the level of use of bullet points, with hyper-hierarchical schemes made it impossible to classify and relate the different sentences, resulting in bad decision making.
Empty words, doublethink, euphemisms, interchange between verbs and nouns, lists or bullet points, vocabulary reduction, simplification,… ..The common points between Orwell’s Newspeak and the format and content of Power Point presentations are quite a lot.
AntiPPT Party
As we have seen in the case of the Columbia accident, today more than ever (with the existing information deluge) sensemaking is very important when analysing documents written in Power Point. Let’s avoid collapses of large companies by the bad use of Power Point
Please become a member of the anti-PPT party, originated in Switzerland, but today an international movement.
