Why Sharing Slides is Crap
At a recent seminar, I was struck by the number of people wondering, “Will these slides be posted?” Struck because the nature of this presentation was such that, without the presenter, the slides wouldn’t do you much good.
It got me thinking about our constant use of slide-creating software, and I realized there are three things that really bug me about it.
1. Slides don’t tell me what I need to know.
Several weeks ago, I followed a friend’s Twitter link to a presentation on SlideShare. I dutifully watched it, but at several points found myself thinking, “Gee, I wonder what she talked about on this slide.” A big ol’ screenshot of a web site probably provided great fodder for her insightful commentary, but didn’t do me much good as a passive observer. If audio would have been included, it would have been a different story but SlideShare doesn’t include audio. Watching a presentation with no one presenting ends up feeling like listening to one side of a phone conversation: you get the gist, but not the whole story. And entire stretches remain a total mystery.
As my pal @rrazor said, “Slides are often (hopefully?) the most content-poor part of a presentation. SlideShare is just a tease.”
Put another way, if I can get everything I need from your slides alone — why would I bother coming to see you speak? And, if I can’t get everything I need from your slides alone — what’s the point of putting them on SlideShare?
2. I’ve had just about enough of slide culture.
I realize I’m swimming against a cultural tsunami that cannot be stopped, but I really wish we could scale back our use of slides. PowerPoint is the ubiquitous format for communicating everything. And I do mean everything. I recently got an invitation to an event that was — you guessed it — a PowerPoint slide. From what I can tell, the ability for this organization to animate the crap out of every piece of text and embed a soundtrack is what really sold them on this format. A nice, clean PDF simply stating the details of the event pales in comparison.
A colleague sent me a deck of slides that had no business being on slides in the first place; it really warranted several pages of text (like a White Paper). Cramming that amount of information into a set of slides is just silliness: it’s an attempt to bullet-ize information that shouldn’t be communicated in bullets. Thoughts that should be sentences end up as half-sensical phrases and groups of thoughts that should be paragraph end up as dense bulleted lists filling up the slide. Why even try to put that amount of data in a slide?
Something about our ADD/multi-tasking/Twitter-ized lifestyles seems to have made us loathe to communicate information in anything other than small, bite-sized chunks. But, guess what? Not everything can be communicated that way. In 2003, Edward Tufte wrote an article titled PowerPoint is evil. The guy’s got a point.
(He’s also got a longer piece on this topic, which I’d highly recommend, including a fascinating look at some slides from NASA about the space shuttle Columbia.)
3. If we really cared, we’d write it down.
Most of the time, when I hear people ask, “Will this be posted online?” what I think they are saying is, “Do I really need to take notes?” These days, we’re so busy tweeting and live-blogging during presentations that we’re only paying half-attention to the presentation itself. So, we want the slides to remind us of the half that we missed. Maybe I’m being old fashioned, but whatever happened to taking notes? If a presenter says something that you think is really important, WRITE IT DOWN. Is it really that hard?
There is one situation I can think of where I found slide sharing helpful. At an Adaptive Path seminar years ago, they distributed several workbooks. One of which was a printout of the presentation in small-slide format with an area for notes next to each slide. This was actually helpful; while the presenter was talking, I jotted down information related to what he was saying. There was so little data on the slides (compared to the oceans of data coming out of the presenter’s mouth) that the slides alone wouldn’t have been any good. The slides plus my notes were okay, but still not half as good as attending the seminar itself. So maybe that’s what’s bugging me: people mistaking the slides for the presentation. The two are not the same. And if they are, the presentation wasn’t worth whatever you paid to attend.
Am I wrong?
What is with our obsession with sharing slides? Maybe someone who voraciously devours presentations posted by other people can help enlighten me: what am I missing here? I can’t imagine asking Al Gore to send me the slides for his presentation, An Inconvenient Truth. Rather than striving to create slides to post for everyone to see, shouldn’t we strive to create presentations that are so engaging that our audience closes their laptops and listens?
I spend most of my time encouraging people to use technology. This week, I’d like to challenge you to not use PowerPoint (and Mac users — that means no Keynote, either). Let’s see how long we can make it.
[cross-posted at the Geek Girls Guide]
April 1st, 2009 at 4:22 am
This is an interesting (and actually oft-heard) view on the (de-)merits of SlideShare. Some people try to provide context to their uploaded presentations by adding slide notes which SlideShare displays below the slides.
Alternatively, others use our slidecast feature to add audio or narration to their slides. Yep, SlideShare DOES support audio, read more at our slidecast faq: http://www.slideshare.net/faqs/slidecast
Or check out some examples here: http://www.slideshare.net/slidecasts
While I agree that watching it on SlideShare is not a substitute for the ability to attend in person, this is a lot better than nothing, right?
April 1st, 2009 at 7:36 am
Ashwan:
Thanks for weighing in. I had no idea there was audio support in SlideShare. Any idea on what percentage of uploaded presentations use the audio feature?
I guess what I’m arguing is that maybe it’s *not* better than nothing. The core of my gripe is this: “if I can get everything I need from your slides alone — why would I bother coming to see you speak? And, if I can’t get everything I need from your slides alone — what’s the point of putting them on SlideShare?”
So, people are either going to be creating slides that can stand on their own (in which case, what’s the point of presenting it — you might as well publish an article) or they’re posting something that can’t be fully grokked just by watching slides. So, then, why share?
But, I’m obviously in the minority here judging by the enthusiasm people have for your product. And for what it’s worth, kudos on creating it. I may not like its purpose, but it’s a well-made tool.
April 1st, 2009 at 8:29 am
Slides are just another medium that depends on the skill and talent of those who adopt it. Let me offer a textbook analogy: a good textbook can stand on it’s own, and a good professor can teach without use of a textbook.
Does that mean the professor shouldn’t profess or the textbook shouldn’t be published?
I’d argue that means that the authors of textbooks and professors have grokked their respective mediums and tools such that when properly paired, the whole becomes something greater than the sum of it’s parts.
This whole slide-sharing thing is still in it’s infancy. Given time it will come into it’s own, and will almost certainly be another powerful tool – in the right hands.
April 1st, 2009 at 1:41 pm
I liked this post, and have wondered about the same thing myself. Just last week a presenter apologized for using (great) visuals that didn’t repeat his content verbatim.
There’s nothing more irritating/boring than sitting through a presentation from someone reading their slides! (I don’t know about the rest of the world, but my own 8th grade speech teacher gave out an “F” if I gave my outlined notes more than a cursory glance.)
However, I DO appreciate referencing the speakers outlined notes after the fact because it can help me fill in details that I may have missed during an information hefty session. Am I advocating handouts rather than SlideShare? Maybe so……
July 14th, 2009 at 10:08 am
I agree that slide presentations have their place, but not every speach needs to have them.
They should be used to illustrate graphs, and other visual elements that can’t be explained, but not just repeat what is being said.