Issue Three

I agree with some of my fellow bloggers that Bumiller was quite biased with respect to her portrayal of power point in the armed forces. This serves as an excellent segway to my main point in rebuttal; like any other communication medium PowerPoint can be exploited just as I feel the print medium was in her article. Although the feelings and examples provided in the article are likely an accurate representation of the situation; Bumiller injects too much of her own thought in reference to the cause of the frustration. She lists quotes and opinions of the situation but then seamlessly transitions to her own opinion that PowerPoint as a program is to blame as opposed to a more reasonable operator error theory. These PowerPoint authors are conveying the information they want in a way that sheds a favorable light in route it to their own ends. Just because PowerPoint is an exceptional program that allows them to do so (just as it is used to facilitate billions of dollars of sales obtained from PowerPoint driven sales presentations) does not by any means draw the conclusion that is it fundamentally flawed. The program allows information to be displayed in a way that is generally understandable, thus it allows biased incomplete information to be conveyed in a way that is generally understandable. The commonality there is information being conveyed in a way that is generally understandable and the difference in result is a direct factor of the inputs not the machine. To comment on the place of an audience centered approach in this situation, I feel the audience centered aproach would be creating a balanced and equal presentation of the facts which is what the audience is expecting. Findproof that PowerPoint is incapable of this and I will begin to blog my appology.