I have never been very technologically savvy. I have always been partial to simply writing down my thoughts down with my favorite pen and marking up an entire piece of paper with my scattered thoughts. For the most part I have fought technology and then my senior year of high school, I was forced to use PowerPoint (and several other programs I wasn’t familiar with at the time) my senior year of high school. Going by Ian Parker’s tone and attitude towards Power Point, I feel that I can relate to him in regards to technology and how it has affected the work force.
For as long as I can remember I always loathed the idea of strict, rigid, guidelines ideas, or anything that is even a slight threat to my creativity. I am a firm believer that there are two (or more) ways to do things and the thought of conforming to a specific template format was never meant for me. One part of the article that really struck me was when Parker discusses the fear some people have toward a blank Power Point page: “’What we need is some automatic content! a former Microsoft developer recalls, laughing. ‘Punch the button and you’ll have a presentation.”’ The fact that there are programs that can pretty much do the work for you is astonishes me. Perhaps I’m just an old-timer stuck in a twenty year-old’s body, but conveying your ideas and thoughts onto a blank piece of paper is the only way to go. It defeats the whole purpose of creating a Power Point in the first place. Being restricted and guided by a computer who ‘knows better’ than me is not my cup of tea.
Even though I use Microsoft Word on a daily basis, Power Point just is not something that thrills me (obviously). I think Parker would agree when I say that programs with strict, cookie-cutter formatting will be the death of creativity and originality as we know it. Melodramatic I know, but when a professor does not include a book on his Power Point simply because he does not know how to conform it to a few bullet points, you know there's a problem deveolping.