PowerPoint, Communication, and the Knowledge Society

Hubert Knoblauch is a professor of sociology at the Technical University of Berlin.

• Acknowledgments; Part I. Introduction: 1. 'PowerPoint' and powerpoint; 2. Communication culture; 3. Information and knowledge society; 4. Structure of the book; Part II. On the History of PowerPoint: 5. The archaeology of PowerPoint; 6. The double invention of PowerPoint; 7. Presentation as digital document and presentation as event; 8. PowerPoint is evil - discourse and studies on PowerPoint; 9. Tufte and the public discourse on PowerPoint; 10. The inconclusiveness of studies on PowerPoint; 11. Presentation as event and genre; Part III. Communicative Action, Culture, and the Analysis of Communicative Genres: 12. Communicative actions and genres; 13. The three levels of genre analysis and communication culture; Part IV. The Internal Level: Slides, Speech, and Synchronization: 14. Rhetoric of visual presentation; 15. Slides, text, and speech; 16. Multimodality and the synchronization of speech slides; 17. Speech and talk; 18. Linguistic deixis, paralleling, and communicative things; 19. Lists and seriality; 20. Macrostructures; Part V. The Intermediate Level: Pointing, the Body Formation, and the Triadic Structure of PowerPoint Presentations: 21. Pointing, gesture, and speech; 22. Pointing, speech, and the objectification of meaning; 23. Body formation and the triadic structure of the presentation; 24. Technology, failures and footing; Part VI. The External Level: Settings, Meetings, and the Ubiquity of PowerPoint: 25. Objects, settings, and spaces; 26. The temporal order of presentations and the meeting; 27. The multiplication and the ubiquity of PowerPoint presentation; Part VII. Conclusion: the Ubiquity of PowerPoint and the Communicative Culture of Knowledge Society: 28. The invention and ubiquity of PowerPoint presentations; 29. Contextualization and mediatization; 30. Communicative things and the subjectification of knowledge; 31. PowerPoint presentation in the communicative culture of knowledge society; Part VIII. Appendices: Appendix 1; Appendix 2; Appendix 3; Appendix 4; References; Index.

'… The book is intended for an academic audience with an interest in understanding how knowledge is created via powerpoint. … Knoblauch's book is an extensive and in-depth investigation into why powerpoint has become the de facto presentation style.... This book is a first step to fully understanding a means of communication that is exploding in use.' Kimberly Fairchild Kimberly Fairchild, PsycCRITIQUES