Powerpoint, Communication, and the Knowledge Society Hubert Knoblauch Frontmatter More Information

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Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-19732-8 - PowerPoint, Communication, and the Knowledge Society Hubert Knoblauch Frontmatter More information

PowerPoint, Communication, and the Knowledge Society

PowerPoint has become an integral part of academic and professional life across the globe. In this book, Hubert Knoblauch offers the first complete analysis of the PowerPoint presentation as a form of communication. Knoblauch charts the diffusion of PowerPoint and explores its significance as a ubiquitous and influential element of contemporary communication culture. His analysis considers the social and intellec- tual implications of the genre, focusing on the dynamic relationships among the aural, visual, and physical dimensions of PowerPoint presentations, as well as the diverse institutional contexts in which these presentations take place. Ultimately, Knoblauch argues that the param- eters of the Powerpoint genre frame the ways in which information is presented, validated, and absorbed, with ambiguous consequences for the acquisition and transmission of knowledge. This original and timely book is relevant to scholars of communications, sociology, and education.

Hubert Knoblauch is a professor of sociology at the Technical University of Berlin.

© in this web service Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 978-0-521-19732-8 - PowerPoint, Communication, and the Knowledge Society Hubert Knoblauch Frontmatter More information

Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive and Computational Perspectives

Series Editor Emeritus John Seely Brown, Xerox Palo Alto Research Center

General Editors Christian Heath, Work, Interaction and Technology, The Department of Management, King’s College London Roy Pea, Professor of Education and the Learning Sciences and Director, Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning, Stanford University Lucy A. Suchman, Centre for Science Studies and Department of Sociology, Lancaster University, UK

Books in the Series

The Construction Zone: Working for Cognitive Change in School Denis Newman, Peg Griffin, and Michael Cole

Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger

Street Mathematics and School Mathematics Terezinha Nunes, David William Carraher, and Analucia Dias Schliemann

Understanding Practice: Perspectives on Activity and Context Seth Chaiklin and Jean Lave, Editors

Distributed Cognitions: Psychological and Educational Considerations Gavriel Salomon, Editor

The Computer as Medium Peter Bøgh Anderson, Berit Holmqvist, and Jens F. Jensen, Editors

Sociocultural Studies of Mind James V. Wertsch, Pablo del Rio, and Amelia Alvarez, Editors

Sociocultural Psychology: Theory and Practice of Doing and Knowing Laura Martin, Katherine Nelson, and Ethel Tobach, Editors

(Continued after Index)

PowerPoint, Communication, and the Knowledge Society

Hubert Knoblauch

Technische Universität Berlin

cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi, Mexico City

Cambridge University Press 32 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10013-2473, USA www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521197328

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2013

Printed in the United States of America

A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication data Knoblauch, Hubert. PowerPoint, communication, and the knowledge society / Hubert Knoblauch. p. cm. – (Learning in doing) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-521-19732-8 (hardback) 1. Microsoft PowerPoint (Computer file) 2. Presentation graphics software. 3. Communication. 4. Information society. I. Title. P93.53.M534K66 2012 302.23′1–dc23 2012017766

ISBN 978-0-521-19732-8 Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet Web sites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Web sites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

If society is conceived of interactions among individuals, the description of the forms of this interaction is the task of the science of society in the strictest and most essential sense. Georg Simmel (1896)

Lectures are silvern, but slides are golden.

William Henry Young (1896)

Contents

Series Foreword page xiii Acknowledgments xv

1. Introduction 1 1. “PowerPoint” and Powerpoint 1 2. Communication Culture 4 3. Information and Knowledge Society 9 4. Structure of the Book 22 2. on the History of PowerPoint 26 1. The Archaeology of PowerPoint 27 2. The Double Invention of PowerPoint 29 3. Presentation as Digital Document and Presentation as Event 34 4. PowerPoint Is Evil – Discourse and Studies on Powerpoint 37 5. Tufte and the Public Discourse on Powerpoint 39 6. The Inconclusiveness of Studies on Powerpoint 44 7. Presentation as Event and Genre 46 3. Communicative Action, Culture, and the Analysis of Communicative Genres 50 1. Communicative Actions and Genres 51 2. The Three Levels of Genre Analysis and Communication Culture 58 4. The Internal Level: Slides, Speech, and Synchronization 67 1. Rhetoric of Visual Presentation 67 2. Slides, Text, and Speech 71

x Contents

3. Multimodality and the Synchronization of Speech and Slides 77 4. Speech and Talk 79 5. Linguistic Deixis, Paralleling, and Communicative Things 81 6. Lists and Seriality 90 7. Macrostructures 94 5. The Intermediate Level: Pointing, the Body Formation, and the Triadic Structure of Powerpoint Presentations 102 1. Pointing, Gesture, and Speech 103 2. Pointing, Space, and the Objectivation of Meaning 107 3. Body Formation and the Triadic Structure of the Presentation 114 4. Audience Interaction 125 (a) Interaction at the Beginnings of Presentations 127 (b) Audience Interventions 128 (c) Presenters and Audiences 130 (d) Endings and Applause 131 5. Technology, Failures, and Footing 135 (a) Technical Problems and Technical Failures 136 (b) Projection Is What Technology Does 145 6. The External Level: Settings, Meetings, and the Ubiquity of Powerpoint 152 1. objects, Settings, and Spaces 156 2. The Temporal Order of Presentations and the Meeting 166 3. The Multiplication and the Ubiquity of Powerpoint Presentation 172 (a) The Institutionalization of the Meeting 172 (b) Ubiquity and the Structural Diffusion of Technology 176 (c) From Presentations to Powerpoint Presentations 183 7. Conclusion: The Ubiquity of Powerpoint and the Communicative Culture of the Knowledge Society 189 1. The Invention and Ubiquity of Powerpoint Presentations 192 2. Contextualization and Mediatization 195 3. Communicative Things and the Subjectivation of Knowledge 200 4. Powerpoint Presentation in the Communicative Culture of the Knowledge Society 204

Contents xi

Appendix I. Video and the Analysis of Communicative Action 209 Appendix II. Data 213 Appendix III. Transcription Conventions 215 List of Diagrams, Photographs, and Stills and Sources 215 (a) Diagrams 215 (b) Slides 216 (c) Stills 217 Notes 219 References 231 Index 245

Series Foreword

This series for Cambridge University Press is widely known as an interna- tional forum for studies of situated learning and cognition. Innovative contributions are being made by anthropology; by cognitive, developmental, and cultural psychology; by computer science; by education; and by social theory. These contributions are providing the basis for new ways of understanding the social, historical, and contextual nature of learning, thinking, and practice that emerges from human activity. The empirical settings of these research inqui- ries range from the classroom to the workplace, to the high-technology office, and to learning in the streets and in other communities of practice. The situated nature of learning and remembering through activity is a central fact. It may appear obvious that human minds develop in social situations and extend their sphere of activity and communicative competencies. But cognitive the- ories of knowledge representation and learning alone have not provided suf- ficient insight into these relationships. This series was born of the conviction that new exciting interdisciplinary syntheses are under way as scholars and practitioners from diverse fields seek to develop theory and empirical investi- gations adequate for characterizing the complex relations of social and mental life, and for understanding successful learning wherever it occurs. The series invites contributions that advance our understanding of these seminal issues.

Christian Heath Roy Pea Lucy A. Suchman

xiii

Acknowledgments

This book emerged from a series of studies conducted in a research project called “The Performance of Visually Supported Presentations: Genre-Analytic Studies of a Communicative Form Paradigmatic for Knowledge Society,” supported by the German Science Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft). The research team included Melanie Brinkschulte, Felix Degenhardt, Marion Mackert, Anika König, Sabine Petschke, Frederik Pötzsch, Bernt Schnettler, and René Tuma. The explicit plan of the book was to make available the results of the analyses produced by the research team. This book is, therefore, indebted to the work of this research team, the members of whom I am deeply grateful to, and I have tried to make reference to their analyses wherever I draw on them. Because many people have contributed to the analyses and helped to corroborate their results, I regularly use the pronoun “we” when referring to the subjects of the research. “We” is not meant as a pluralis majestatis but, rather, as an acknowledgment of the contribution of the research group to certain findings, findings that have been published in a huge number of publications. The most notable of these is a collected volume published in German (cf. Schnettler and Knoblauch 2007), but the body of subsequent publications also includes some texts in English (cf. Knoblauch 2008). The data analyzed were for the most part collected between 2004 and 2006, and some up to 2008. Given the rapid technological developments, the fast pace of cultural change, and the time it took to write and rework the book, the findings may be subject to some changes. As far as I can see, these changes are slight and do not alter the major argument of the book. The longer I was working on the book, the more I realized that my first intention of merely summarizing and translating texts produced during the research project would not suffice. The task of writing the book turned

xvi Acknowledgments

out to be ever more challenging, particularly since I wanted to address the question of how the situative performance of Powerpoint presentations are linked to more encompassing societal and cultural changes. As a result, writing the book demanded much more time than I had expected and involved many more people than I am able to credit. My sabbatical in 2010 from the Technical University of Berlin provided me with a fine opportunity to write this book. Furthermore, Cornell University and its Department of Science and Technology Studies has been an inspirational place for working on the book, and I am particularly indebted to Christine Leuenberger and Trevor Pinch for their personal support during the sabbatical. The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft supported me in the writing of this book and I am particularly grateful to Eckehard Kämper and two anonymous referees. As indicated, the book is, in some sense, the result of the research endeavors of this research group. It also builds on the work of colleagues with whom the research project was in contact. Most notably, these include Henning Lobin, Joachim Knape, and JoAnne Yates. I am indebted to their research, and I am glad to be able to draw on their results. There are also, of course, other people who have contributed to the book without having been part of the research project. Thanks go to Richard Bretschneider, who was prepared to share his experiences with PowerPoint, as well as to Benjamin Bossmann, Helmut Esser, and Irmgard Schumann. Lucy Hogan and Susan Hedahl from the Wesley Theological Seminary have sent me very valuable information about Powerpoint use in churches. Werner Rammert, Arnold Windeler, and Sabine Reh kept me informed about what is going on in the sociology of technology, organizations, and education. Christian Heath, Paul Luff, Bernt Schnettler, René Tuma, and three anonymous reviewers for Cambridge University Press, who have read proposals as well as early and later versions of the manuscript, helped to clarify my thoughts and choice of text and made me revise it for the better – despite my stubborn resistance to doing so. The facilities of the libraries of the Technical University of Berlin and of Cornell University have been essential to this study. I am also grateful to Felicitas Heine, Miira Hill, Susann Klemcke, Isabel Liebener, Christoph Nagel, and Christoph Rechenberg for their help with texts and technologies, in particular slides and diagrams. Since the book is concerned with a “visual genre,” I should add that I have tried to use visual evidence only when it is really relevant as evidence and refers to data that have been subject to analysis. Because of my doubts as to the “beauty of evidence” and for the sake of brevity I have tried to refrain from purely illustrative visualizations. Ian Copestake and Jayashree helped

Acknowledgments xvii

to tame my language and to render the style as easy to understand as my Teutonic English would allow. Needless to say, despite the help, human effort is never without flaws, all of which I am responsible for. I am dedicating the book to my family, to Barbara, Delia, and Urs, who daily try to convince me more or less successfully that the meaning of life transcends work and science.