I was listening to Lawrence Lessig's speech @ UPenn 4 Barack today. It's a video clip and it's in Lessig's style of talking while many slides go by with just a few key words or an image. Many people are impressed with this style and while I too loved it at first, it's starting to wear on me. Occasionally he does something clever typographically but the real strength to his presentations is what he's actually saying and now I'd rather just see him while he presents, without any slides.
I was reading Richard Dawkins "review" of the creationist propaganda film Expelled. Not only did he not like the message of the film (obviously), he also hated the filmmaking. He described a technique I hadn't heard of before: "A favourite joke among the film-making community is the 'Lord Privy Seal'. Amateurs and novices in the making of documentaries can't resist illustrating every significant word in the commentary by cutting to a picture of it. The Lord Privy Seal is an antiquated title in Britain's heraldic tradition. The joke imagines a low-grade film director who illustrates it by cutting to a picture of a Lord, then a privy [outhouse], and then a seal [balancing a ball on its nose]."
Isn't this what Lessig does? Maybe by using text and forcing the audience to read rather than looking at images makes them a little more involved, but does it help deliver the message? In this presentation he has a picture of Hillary Clinton and to describe a change in her position (a flip-flop), he actually turns the picture upside-down. Is that any different than showing a picture of seal? Maybe in the A.D.D., sound-bite, YouTube age we live in, the added visuals help keep our attention, but given the effort he goes through to create the slides, I'd rather he create more presentations.
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