So, here's a pretty funny video that we watched last night in my "Media and Poetics" class. The class is basically a study of how technology and culture fundamentally shape the way we communicate, the way we create, and the ways we think. As one writer put it, it is the study of the langue of culture vs the parole, or studying the framework within which literature is produced rather than the literature itself. (For e.g., think of poetry 700 years ago vs today, in the days of blogging, how it's gone from mostly oral, written down only if you were rich or well-connected to publishable globally at the push of a button. Or, think of the age of courtly, king Arthur style literature, where pretty much everything that was created was done within a very limited framework of the "questing knight" story.)
Last week, for e.g., we read an article by a scientist who studied the space shuttle Challenger disaster, looking at how the use of Power Point in NASA presentations (and pretty much all presentations anywhere, ever these days) was directly responsible for the overlooking or burying of vital information that would have prevented the disaster. The author argued that Power Point was designed for a "pitch" (i.e. a quick, agressive, sales-based presentation) and that it has serious flaws in its ability to present detailed, technical, scientific information (for e.g., the inability to express certain technical data, formulas, etc).
Anyway, this video is a pretty hilarious critique of how news is presented, and a great reminder that it's produced within a very specific social, cultural and technological framework, and therefore is not in any way "neutral".
6 comments:
Sounds like a cool course.
That's me.
that's brilliant.
I passionately despise PowerPoint, it will be the demise of all good decision making. And I say that as someone whose job it is is to make power point presentations to be used for good decision making.
totally.
he said that all the necessary information had been gathered to save the shuttle, which was orbiting with a damaged wing, and there were even very specific mentions of exactly what to fix and how to go about doing so.
but because of the "bullet" style, this info was buried under optimistic headlines.
Power Point failed, he said, because it doesn't allow for explanation that the scientists and the decision makers above them were working with two unrelated data sets.
power point fails science, he said, because it doesn't allow for the development or explanations of complex interrelationships between and among ideas or systems.
PowerPoint didn't fail, people failed because they relied on the wrong tool.
touché
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