<!–Uday Deb
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Can there be a nightmare worse than waking up to find oneself listening to slide 62 of a 300-slide presentation? As anyone who works anywhere knows, this is a nightmare that comes true with depressing frequency. Larger corporations take perverse delight in carting scores of people off to exotic destinations and then locking them up in a very cold room and holding day long meetings full of slide presentations.
One of the saving graces of working from home is that one’s exposure this deadly virus of another kind has been reduced. The slide presentation is less in evidence than usual, and even when it is, apps like Zoom have the wonderful facility of being able to switch off the video, allowing one to gambol and frolic amidst the pastoral vistas of one’s home while an earnest user of slides drones on.
It is interesting how the word ‘presentation’ has solidified in meaning. At its heart, its meaning is closer to that of a ‘representation’, a case being made for a proposal. With time however, it has come to mean a formal discourse rendered with the help of slide points, a fully realised media form all by itself. Or in an abbreviation understood more widely than one can imagine, a ppt.
The earlier presentations in memory were hand written on plastic foils or acetates. The focus was on capturing one’s flow of thought, and having a common frame of reference with the audience. One’s thoughts were scribbled, and slides were chockful of material. Then came the era of the carousel tray and the photographic slides which involved an enormously laborious process of typing out and proofing the slide points, converting them into slides in a studio, sorting them on a lightbox while squinting furiously and then loading them sequentially in a carousel tray and finally praying the contraption worked and did not end spewing out slides in demented rage as was often the case.
Not surprisingly, given the cumbersome nature of the process, this kind of a presentation was restricted to a relatively small set of people and was far from being a cultural phenomenon. It is with the arrival of the computer and the launch of presentation packages like PowerPoint that things truly changed. With it, it became possible for anybody to put together a slide presentation.
There are strong reasons why the idea of making slide presentations is so attractive. It democratises the task of presenting a formal argument by providing a way of assembling and presenting information across media in order to make a point. It is easy to put together by an individual without the help of anybody else, and can be presented equally simply with the tools that are now readily available.
PowerPoint allowed anyone to look and speak like a professional. Armed with laptops, standing in front of an audience, clicking through slides one by one- this became the default representation of a professional on the move. After all this was not just talk, but a presentation. A sign of being prepared, of being in command of one’s arguments. Talk is loose, it is unstructured hence cheap. Talk feels …….
Source: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/Citycitybangbang/the-meaning-of-powerpoint-notes/