PowerPoint demonstrations: digital technologies of persuasion

Theory, Culture & Society, 2008

When policy issues involve complex technical questions, demonstrations are more likely to marshal charts, graphs, models, and simulations than to mobilize popular movements in the streets. In this paper we analyze PowerPoint demonstrations, the most ubiquitous form of digital demonstrations. Our first set of demonstrations are the PowerPoint presentations made in December 2002 by the seven finalist architectural teams in the Innovative Design competition for rebuilding the World Trade Center. Our second case occurred some blocks away, several months later: Colin Powell's PowerPoint demonstration at the United Nations. We argue that Edward Tufte's denunciation of PowerPoint does not capture the cognitive style made possible by the affordances of this pervasive new technology. On the basis of our case materials, we demonstrate the distinctive morphology of PowerPoint. Its digital character provides affordances 1) that allow heterogeneous materials to be seamlessly re-presented in a single format that 2) can morph easily from live demonstration to circulating digital documents that 3) can be utilized in counter-demonstrations. A careful examination of this widely used technology is critical for understanding public discourse in a democratic society.

Design Issues, 2021

President Barack Obama's State of the Union speeches were distributed online as so–called Enhanced versions, where the television images of Obama delivering the speech were accompanied by pictures, graphs, and tables used to convince the audience about the factual state of affairs in the United States. The article explores this combination of the rhetoric and epistemology of visuality and information design on the one hand and political oratory on the other. The article demonstrates how the Enhanced State of the Union is a hybrid genre using visuals to create a rhetoric of reification and reality, apparently aiming not to argue but only to establish facts.

Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks, 2023

AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research

Visualizations are reliant on visual encoding, in which attributes of data are depicted through graphic symbols (Cairo, 2019). As such, they are placed as a transitional mode between data and information in the linear framework of the "wisdom hierarchy" (DIKW). In the digital information environment, both the linear learning process and the distinction between data and information merit a re-evaluation. This paper seeks to create a better understanding of information's role in digital culture, by venturing to re-examine its attributes. Relying on a sample of all visualizations posted by the top four candidates of the 2016 US elections (n=252), I applied qualitative grounded analysis informed by theory: First, I constructed a conceptual model for the attributes of information, which relies on three layers – (1) foundation (substantiation/sources); (2) building blocks (data components); (3) data-structures (analysis). Second, following a classification of all units accor...

2018

A major feature of the analysis impacts the rhetorical techniques used by creating powerful visual and verbal messages during the protests supporting the Central European University (CEU) in April 2017 in Budapest. Images as part of the visual rhetoric are considered as the main tools in the rhetorical persuasion in a virtual environment concerning the freedom to express feelings and ideas. The flexibility of online social networks as a suitable platform for developing persuasion techniques with regard to civil appeals is discussed, as well. The messages are classified based on the understanding of the classical rhetoricians that there are three basic means of persuasions – rational, emotional and ethical, and the manifestation of all three is analysed based on the visual and verbal messages in social media platforms and on the streets. The use of language and images as a symbolic means of inducing persuasion among the society is analysed by both informative and emotional aspects of...

Part 1 of this manuscript is a dramatization of five rhetorical scenes that take the Occupy phenomenon as a moment to explore features of contemporary social protest and change. Drawing on rhetorical field notes collected over the first two weeks of Occupy Lincoln in Nebraska, we identify how historical tensions between activism and deliberation were both complicated and reasserted as the Occupy moment became a movement. The rhetorical scenes partially replicate actual conversations, though they are remediated through three composite figures: Anda, a longtime social activist; John, an advocate of democratic deliberation; and Dajuan, an undergraduate organizer of the local Occupy Movement. The footnotes throughout the dramatization anchor scholarly observations in Part 2 of the manuscript, a "footnote essay" which develops the concept of "networked public screens."

On the surface, the recent mobilization of opposition to the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) over the internet appears to be yet another cyberactivism success. Yet, the anti-SOPA movement should have been doomed to failure for two reasons. First, the issue was too abstract to mobilize local kinship and friendship groups. Second, because mass media interests were served by the bill, mass media was unmotivated to diffuse the anti-SOPA message. Our analysis of this movement suggests it succeeded because of cybermediaries, internet companies that used their sites to diffuse the anti-SOPA message. They accomplished this through cultural productions of protest frames and tactics -technology-based verbal, graphical, and experiential representations of the SOPA protest frame and technology-based toolkits for use at the cybermediaries' sites as well as for use at visitors' sites. Our key contribution lies in identifying the nature and relative impact of these frames and tactics in cyberactivism.