I feel like there's more to say about PowerPoint etc so I've been 'reading around' it - looking for new ways in. This podcast interview with Dave Gorman gave me an angle I'd not thought about.
(For those that don't know he uses PowerPoint a lot in his shows.)
He says one of the things he likes about it is the way he can use it to explore ideas that aren't already in people's heads.
He explains it like this: if he's doing a routine about, say, adverts as a regular stand-up he can only refer to things that he's confident the whole audience already knows about, their common set of references. It's probably going to be hard for him to come up with better jokes than one they've already made to themselves. But with PowerPoint he can show them some Belgian advert they've never seen and point out how it connects to stuff they already know. He can introduce new cultural references. And there's probably something more magical about creating a link between something an audience already knows and something they've never seen before.
That made me think about two things.
One - my favourite presentations introduce new ideas and connect them to ones I already know about. They have a wide range of references.
Two - I wonder if this is why clipart is so deadening. It's almost the opposite of introducing a new and illuminating idea. It's a picture of some money next to a fact about money, and it's the most cliched, simplistic and 'general' picture of money, almost by definition. It signals to the audience - really clearly - I haven't been arsed to think about this.