For approximately fifteen years during the decades of the eighties and nineties, I traveled extensively with opportunities to share my thoughts regarding high school athletics and the entrenched dynamics within the 'sports-family' consisting of athletes, parents and coaches. I recall once when a Pennsylvania high school athletic director asked me if my speeches were 'power-point-presentations.' Power point presentations are the thing these days. I suppose people listen better and absorb more if the presenter uses visual slides, graphs and pictures. We do live in a gadget-crazed culture with our now generation's IPads, IPhones and hand-held data base contraptions. The problem for me was always simple: Anything with more moving parts than a watermelon was problematic.
The question of 'power-point' presentations is an interesting one. On the one-hand if a speech has substance and delivered with true passion why do folks need a slide show? I wonder if the younger generation tends to suffer from some form of attention deficit disorder? Perhaps presenters are expecting too much of today's audience by expecting a degree of imagination over show and tell?
I don't know your take but I cannot believe Martin Luther King's 'I Have a Dream' speech could have been enhanced with 'power points.' Nobody in Yankee Stadium on July. 4, 1939, needed a huge electro-mechanical scoreboard to capture the moment with tears and goose bumps when a dying Lou Gehrig delivered his farewell speech. Finally, I visited Gettysburg's battlefield and its museum; never noticed amongst the artifacts an overhead projector. Poor Abe...think how good he could've been?
No comments:
Post a Comment