The other day my friend Jon related to me a strange story of being dumped via e-mail.. Rather than do it face to face or via phone, the guy wrote an e-mail that listed — get this — bullet points on Jon’s perceived shortcomings.
“How rude!” was the consensus.
This morning, I came across this explanation for the e-mail dumping phenomenon: the prevalence of Microsoft PowerPoint.
[via Boing Boing]
Edward Tufte points out in his book, The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, PowerPoint presentations sacrifice substance for style, are incredibly information-sparse, use abbreviations and syntactic shortcuts since you can’t fit that much on a slide and are really for the benefit of the speaker, not the audience. PowerPoint faciltitates getting through an unpleasant task as quickly as possible, which is a primary goal in both business presentations and breakups.
