> As PowerPoint became more and more pervasive, a meeting could only
exist so long as a slide deck existed.
Good insight here. I've written about this dominance of visual record
culture as a "Pics or it didn't happen" attitude that takes over
business. It's corrosive and it tracks the decline of actual
productive work as the overemphasis on process and perfomative work
displaces it.
We've slipped into a culture of form over function, appearance over
substance, narrative over reality... PowerPoint exemplifies this
idolatry of representation - it's the thing we focus on while ignoring
the talk by the person actually present. It's a way of intermediating
and so avoiding engagement.
I also think that the current fetish for "capturing" everything as
video to create "hybrid" working environment is inviting
burnout. Besides, it is a weak form of information (non searchable,
bulky, often of dubious quality). Digital information flows are not
all information flows. Documents of record are not what actually
happened. The map is not the territory.
