 |
| Photo
from an earlier talk: Paul Bator and his class talk with Steven
Pinker during his visit to Stanford in 2004.
|
Tufte's exciting presentation
at Stanford suggests that exclusive reliance upon a single mode
of presentation risks neglecting what Kristeva refers to as the
symbolic or semiotic linguistic action that signals a context within
which diverse actors play their role in the enactment of communicative
discourse.
For example, his painstaking analysis of the flawed PowerPoint
summary slide considering the O-ring damage on the space shuttle
Challenger persuaded me that the slide creators were linguistically
hamstrung and, thus, unable to convey the immediate danger convincingly.
Tufte’s same analysis, however, highlights the need for
multiple forms of rhetoric to engage an audience. Surely, NASA
officials did not rely upon a single PowerPoint slide for input:
there was a flurry of discussions, meetings, agenda, media reports,
plans, papers, telephone calls, e-mails, and so forth.
As a PWR instructor,
what I take away from the evening with Tufte is, to apply Walter
Benjamin’s thinking, the need to remind students to give
thought to how to situate their
multi-media presentations “between two worlds”: the
immediate present and the uncertainty (“chaos”) of
the surrounding environment.
|
