Slide show
Are you ready for PowerPoint Karaoke?
IT SEEMS AT first like any other night's entertainment. The crowd, laughing and heckling, settles down slightly as a palpably nervous person approaches the mike. There's an air of expectancy, a little current of excitement. Someone in the audience shouts something unintelligible. A beam of light illuminates the screen, and {hellip} up starts the PowerPoint presentation.
PowerPoint?
The person in front of the room launches into a completely impromptu talk from a PowerPoint slide deck she has never seen before. The results are openly, gleefully absurd.
If you've never heard of PowerPoint Karaoke, that probably means you're neither German nor a hardcore techie. The phenomenon has been spreading geek to geek and conference to conference since it was invented by a German artists' group in 2005. PowerPoint Karaoke sessions have been held at last year's E-Tech conference in San Diego, the Chaos Conference in Berlin, and at smaller tech gatherings in Los Angeles, London, and Montreal.
In a typical event, a few brave people volunteer to "present" a random deck of slides pulled off the Web, or borrowed from friends or employers. (I first heard about PowerPoint Karaoke when an organizer asked if she could use a deck I had presented on word meanings.) The audience laughs, cheers, and yells out suggestions as the presenters gamely struggle to link one slide to the next, transforming something that probably started life as a tedious corporate monologue into a five-minute flight of creative irony.
PowerPoint Karaoke might seem like a one-off, the geek equivalent of macho stunts like chainsaw racing. But it is part of a robust tradition in the geek world: the mordant parody of business culture. At the Wikimania conference in Boston in 2006, there was a contest for the best five-minute "elevator pitch" for a mock Web 1.0 business plan; the blog (and new book) of the "Fake Steve Jobs" parodies the inside baseball and personalities of Silicon Valley culture; and the Web is cluttered with meticulously crafted Web 2.0 logo parodies. PowerPoint Karaoke is just one more way for geeks to make fun of the suits - using the suits' own tools to do so.
Of all the loathed tools of office oppression, PowerPoint is probably Public Enemy No. 1. Its critics liken it to a Procrustean bed for ideas, one that dilutes real passion and innovation into an endless stream of bullet points. Anyone who doubts that PowerPoint can suck the life out of even the most inspiring talk can check out the hilariously banal PowerPoint version of the Gettysburg Address (norvig.com/Gettysburg/index.htm).
"In the hands of the wrong person [PowerPoint] and any presentation software becomes a dangerous weapon, a means of torture and incredible torments," says Holm Friebe, who invented PowerPoint Karaoke as part of the German artists' group Zentrale Intelligenz Agentur.
But in a bar, with a beer, PowerPoint becomes more Monty Python, less "Catch-22." Instead of being victimized by someone who insists on reading aloud Every Single Bullet Point in a grim death march to the final corporate-logo slide, you have a presenter who is just as lost as you are, if not more so. The playing field is leveled; the inmates are running the asylum.
And unlike regular karaoke, where the singer's performance is measured against that of a professional rock star, a PowerPoint Karaoke presentation usually has nowhere to go but up from the original version.
Some karaoke slides are pure cliche. ("We offer a wide range of solutions!") Others, taken out of context, feel purely, startlingly random. A chest X-ray. The planet Earth surrounded by cartoon heads. And who thought it was a good idea to superimpose an image of
Erin O'Connor, a graduate student in computational linguistics at San Diego State University, is organizing a PowerPoint Karaoke session for a tech gathering this coming June. She likes it because it gives "extroverted geeks" an outlet: "It's like karaoke without the embarrassment of exposing your singing voice to strangers," she says.
If you want to try it yourself, setting up a PowerPoint Karaoke night is very simple: Collect a laptop and a projector, grab a bunch of friends, download a few slide decks from the Web (preferably ones under a Creative Commons license that permits sharing - find them by searching for files ending in .ppt), and randomly assign the slide decks to the participants. Alcoholic beverages are optional, but seem to make things run more smoothly.
Aside from being a rollicking good time, PowerPoint Karaoke may hold transformative potential for the workplace. Even if only a few office PowerPoint devotees stopped and thought "Would this slide go over well in a bar?," the lives of many, many office workers could be dramatically improved.
Erin McKean is a lexicographer (dictionaryevangelist.com) and blogger (dressaday.com).
