Powerpoint und das Pathos digitaler Formular- Rhetorik

The essay will discuss how PowerPoint historically emerged (at the turn of the 1980ies) from the mission statement towards the (back then brand new) Graphical User Interface that would provide a new machine/man metaphor called »Private Computer«. Therein was expressed, as the lecture argues, the self-presentation of a locally bound and fast growing corporate economic culture called »Silicon Valley« represented in its own diagrammatical schemes. The immanent rhetoric of the software - developed under the (much more appropriate) name »Presenter« - unwillingly disrupts the digital brilliance of the computer interface in reinforcing it at the same time - a Silicon Valley style of making progress. However, the disclosure of PowerPoint rhetorics as classical formulaic rhetoric shows the boundaries in which the program can be of only limited use. This mixture between a classical old rhetorical style and the build-in-hope of a fantastical new future might explain why a quarter of a century and ten software versions later Powerpoint has become so overwhelmingly popular (used on more than one billion computers), while at the same time mutated into one of the most scandalous bugbears of the digital.