Absolute PowerPoint by Ian Parker appeared May 28, 2001. It's is one of my all-time favorites and the only article I literally cut out to save and show anyone that was interested. I still have it on my desk. It starts out with the story of a women who creates an eighteen page PowerPoint presentation to "pitch" the household chores to her two daughters. One daughter becomes so upset that she bursts into tears.
The program orginally went on sale in April 1987 available only for Macintosh. It took until 1990 for PowerPoint to bullet point it's way into our consciousness when it was bundled with Windows 3.0. Today everyone has their personal tales of how it has both annoyed and captured them, from Screen Beans and multiple effects photos zooming and folding into view to charts in neon colors that make lackluster sales results look dazzling in 3-d bars and pie charts.
There are "business" PowerPoint training classes in every major city, on live webinars and on-line tutorials. Not to mention a full range of PowerPoint for Dummies books and various bibles and guides. All this to reduce the art of actual conversation to five or seven word bullet points. Preferably three to five per slide. The only proper New Yorker reader response to this is ARGG! Tearing out one's hair is optional.
The New Yorker site now has the complete article: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2001/05/28/010528fa_fact_parker
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