archive.Joe Lamantia.com

Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Presentation Prize today.

Though I’m sad to say it, this latest round of Celebrity Information Design Death Match, pitting Information Visualization Guru Dr. Edward Tufte vs. presentation tools and their legions of droning slide shufflers goes too –
Presentation software (at least it’s Keynote)…
<announcer voice>
Gore’s Nobel Prize must truly be a bitter pill for the esteemed Dr. Tufte, whose extensive declamations on the evils of PowerPoint remain insightful and even amusing, but have been outflanked by Gore’s combination of savvy presentation techniques, and repeated use of the famous “Earth’s Environment Is About to Perish” flying scissorkick move.
</announcer voice>

Seriously: Aside from the environment (we fervently hope), the real winner of this year’s Nobel Peace prize is effective storytelling that blends qualitative and quantitative messages to create a compelling visually supported narrative experience that clearly communicates complex ideas in an emotionally compelling package.

The scientists and Mr. Gore take quite different approaches to the climate changes. The committee has been a measured, peer-reviewed, government-approved statement focused on the most non-controversial findings, whereas Mr. Gore rails against a “planetary emergency.”

Both messages — however imperfect — play their part, scientists said on Friday. The Nobel Prize “is honoring the science and the publicity, and they’re necessarily different,” said Spencer A. Weart, a historian at the American Institute of Physics and author of The Discovery of Global Warming, a recent book.
From Gore and U.N. Panel Win Peace Prize for Climate Work

Dr. Tufte says, “PowerPoint presentations too often resemble a school play – very loud, very slow, and very simple.” Too often, Dr. Tufte is right: think about how many times in the last five years you’ve considered feigning a seizure or gastro-intestinal distress to escape a truly awful presentation.

Yet for some ideas – and perhaps the very biggest of audiences – ‘the [school] play’s the thing’. Loud, slow, and simple might be just the right rhetorical style for complex messages that require the broadest kinds of consensus. (If Gore had figured this out during the campaign in 2000, the world would certainly be a very different place today…)

And yet, despite Gore’s pivotal role in shaping the Internet, a search for “al gore inconvenient truth” on the Slideshare website turns up – well – nothing that seems relevant in the first 10 results. There’s likewise no slideware to be had at the official site for the movie. But rest assured Mr. Gore, we know the humble origins of your Nobel Prize and Oscar winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth lie in a mere slide show.