 I keep giving lectures about how important it is to have extra grid capacity, but nobody seems interested in my PowerPoints. Hamlet is an early 17th century tragedy in Five Acts written by William Shakespeare, a work consisting of nearly 30,000 words and published in his current form in his First Folia, typeset by Isaac Jaggard onto 31 pages with two columns of text per page. Hamlet was a dramatic performance by the Lord Chamberlain's men for King James I in 1619, with Richard Burbage cast in the titular role, belting his lines from the creaky wooden stage to the second-story gallery seats in the Old Globe Theater. Hamlet is a lavish 1996 film by Kenneth Branagh that cost over $18 million to produce, a whopping four-hour cinematic behemoth featuring an extensive cast of famous actors, including Robin Williams, Kate Winslet, Gerard de Bardieu, and Judy Dench, shown briefly in theaters and nominated for four Academy Awards. Hamlet is a 2009 webcomic by Dan Carroll, each of its 329 pages illustrated with charmingly quirky stick figures in black and white, with a number of pop cultural references and visual gags that are impressively funny within the limitations of its MS paint style artwork. These Hamlets are all identical in content. They each contain the full text of Shakespeare's play, every single word. The original printed text, the physical paper and ink version with its printing defects and funny s's, has some one-to-one correspondence with the words spoken in the Kenneth Branagh film, but even ignoring things like historical, cultural, or personal context, which can change from century to century or performance to performance. Any description of what meaning should be conveyed by each of these versions of Hamlet is going to involve more than their content, the words themselves. It's necessarily going to involve their form, the details of how those words are embodied. The content still matters to be sure, and Hamlet without it to be or not to be is no Hamlet at all, but trying to discuss the content's meaning somehow independent of its form, or vice versa, is ignoring the critical interplay between the two. Aiming the camera up at the physically imposing Brian Blessed in full plate armor and down at the svelte Kenneth Branagh changes the meaning of the words they speak in the play. We see the diminutive prince as an ineffectual child in the shadow of his gargantuan father, a small weak boy urged to act by the ghost of a brutal man of action. If thou hast nature in thee, bear it not. Let not the royal bed of Denmark be a couch for luxury and damned incest. If Hamlet were also framed as a big strong man, that line would be a sort of, let's do this moment. With a larger than life figure like Brian Blessed staring disappointedly down at his pathetic son, that if, looms large, do you have nature in you, boy? The meaning of the words is literally different, and there's no stage direction for any of this in the original paper copy of the play. Just enter ghost and Hamlet. Ghost and Hamlet? The intimate relationship between form, meaning, and content might seem like a nerdy concern for philosophers and literary analysts, but it's thrombing away under dozens of choices you make every day. Should I fire off a quick email, or would it be better to compose some sort of memo or report? Can I do this on my phone, or should I get out my laptop? What language should I write this code in? Would it be better to text or call your mother? You should call your mother. Even your decision about how to watch this video, or just listen to it in the background as you wash dishes, carries an implicit judgment about what form you think is best suited for getting the meaning you want out of it. There's certainly something that all those different experiences have in common, but these words are going to mean something different if you're hearing them over earbuds on a bus versus watching me say them on a 70-inch TV in your living room. Unfortunately, as media theorist Marshall McLuhan famously highlighted, we have a tendency to focus intently on the content part of media, the text, or maybe implied meaning of the text, often to the exclusion of everything else. This is doubly true if it conforms to cultural practices and norms. You don't notice the font choice of an email unless it's not black 11-point calibre or aerial. You don't notice that YouTube videos are 16x9 until you run into an upload of some old TV show with big bars on either side of the screen. As with most cultural practices, these norms are a result of conscious decisions, evolved practicality, and random chance, but importantly, they do not become semantically inert just because they're defaults. Even if the shape of our creative output conforms to the expectations of our audience, that shape still has a profound influence on what can and will be interpreted on their end. A 16x9 aspect ratio does something to the meaning of a YouTube video, whether I want it to or not. This implies a question. How exactly do the default forms of media we use affect the landscape of concepts and meanings? Are those effects desirable? Could we avoid some of the worst problems by paying a little more attention to where and when we choose to use certain kinds of media, or the default forms of that media? In an exceedingly grumpy 2004 essay titled The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, statistician, political scientists, computer scientists, and data visualization theorist Edward Tufty advances an argument that the explosion in popularity of PowerPoint slides has had significant ramifications for the speed, detail, and effectiveness of technical communication. He highlights numerous issues endemic to the form of PowerPoint, pressures of the medium that might be mitigated by a careful author taking special pains to work around them, but taken all together might well compel a careful author to think twice about using PowerPoint in the first place. Take information density. Tufty asserts that PowerPoint is an exceptionally low bandwidth medium for raw information. The average graphic in a PowerPoint contains only 12 numbers, comparable to works of political propaganda, and the average slide only contains about 15 words, a density on par with billboards. Compared to the information density of something like a single page from a cookbook or a newspaper, you'd need dozens and dozens of slides to cover the same ground. Not impossible, but probably unwieldy, if not totally opaque. He also notes that the preferred PowerPoint organizational framework of bullet-pointed lists creates an often mistaken impression of linearity and hierarchy. Bullets can only convey relationships of sequence, priority, or membership in a set. Relationships like causality, feedback loops, emergence, simultaneity, or any other pattern of nonlinear organization can't be elegantly represented this way. Bullet-pointed might give the reassuring appearance of well-structured analytic thought, but if the subject actually demands consideration of one of these sorts of relationships, well, you'd never know if the author thought of them or not. Tufty cites several real-life examples of what he considers to be the corrosive effect of PowerPoint on technical communication, including a vicious teardown of some of the slides NASA management used to make decisions that ultimately led to the Columbia Space Shuttle Disaster, suggesting that a simple engineering white paper would have communicated the necessary information about damage to the shuttle's wing with much more fidelity and much less noise and ambiguity. He also critiques the whole vibe of PowerPoint itself, suggesting that the program mirrors the structure and priorities of Microsoft, an unholy hybrid of slick marketing style over substance, and brutish myopic algorithmic thinking. He asks, what could be a worse metaphor for good presentation? Tufty's essay has been enormously popular in the 20 years since he first published it, cited over 1,400 times, and finding its way into a fair amount of academic research on the effects and effectiveness of PowerPoint in technical communication, and, more and more frequently, education. For example, a deliciously snarky literature review by Russell Craig and Joel Amronik details several findings on how classrooms are being changed by increasingly pervasive PowerPoint pedagogy. The report that classes that use PowerPoint do not perform markedly better at recall or testing than traditional lecture classes. The use of PowerPoint measurably dampens some of the interpersonal aspects of scholarship, including things like reading a class's response or engaging them in discussion, encouraging more of a conduit or transfer model of education, where the role of the instructor is simply to upload the requisite knowledge into the students instead of, say, building it collaboratively. It discourages activities like free association, comparison, creative thinking, or skepticism, as the flow of a slide deck sort of forbids interruption and makes backtracking or side discussions distracting rather than elucidating. Even in the midst of these findings, Craig and Amronik raise some meager counters to Tufty's uniformly pessimistic view, suggesting that PowerPoint can be an effective teaching tool in the right hands, if the presenter is competent and navigates their way carefully around its various pitfalls and failure modes. That certainly seems plausible. I don't think that anyone would argue that it's impossible to give an informative high bandwidth, high fidelity presentation with a series of slides. But it's worth asking, does the form of PowerPoint constrain or shift the landscape of meaning in a way that makes effective pedagogy and technical communication harder than it might be using some other media? Could it be that by making PowerPoint the default medium for these contexts, we're causing more issues on balance than we would otherwise? What other forms of media might stand an honest appraisal of how suitable they are for their intended meaning? Please, leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to follow us, subscribe, and share. And don't stop thunking.