PowerPoint parties and the joy of ‘useless’ knowledge

HAVE you been to a PowerPoint party? In this Gen Z trend, each attendee of the party gives a PowerPoint presentation on a topic that can be serious or downright silly. You could educate your friends on quantum mechanics or critique the top Internet memes of 2023.

While virtual PowerPoint parties emerged during pandemic lockdowns, they remain popular and are even hosted in-person. A colleague recently showed me an elaborate deck of slides on K-dramas that she had prepared for such a party, complete with a breakdown of the metrics she used to rate each drama.

PowerPoint parties speak to the joys of aimless, spontaneous learning. They repurpose a tool associated with the tedium of work and direct fresh energy towards something you actually enjoy or genuinely want to know more about.

There is no expectation of usefulness. The only “key performance indicator” is stirring your friends’ curiousity.

I find the idea of PowerPoint parties inspiring. It’s a great reminder of how much joy we can derive from learning for its own sake, almost as a form of play. The more “useless” the knowledge, the more meaningful it can be.

In a 1939 article titled The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge, American educator Abraham Flexner marvelled at how many of the world’s most useful inventions have their roots in useless pursuits.

Take the radio for instance. Its creation is credited to Guglielmo Marconi, but the Italian inventor was merely the final link in a long line of scientists. The radio would not be possible without the curiosity of James Clerk Maxwell, who in 1865 conducted obscure calculations on magnetism and electricity, and Heinrich Hertz, who proved the existence of electromagnetic waves predicted by Maxwell.

“Neither Maxwell nor Hertz had any concern about the utility of their work; no such thought ever entered their minds. They had no practical objective. The inventor in the legal sense was of course Marconi, but what did Marconi invent? Merely the last technical detail,” Flexner wrote.

The same concept applies to art, music and “every other expression of the untrammelled human spirit”, said Flexner. The mere fact that these pursuits bring satisfaction to one’s soul is all the justification needed.

Musings on Off Tangent

I started writing Off Tangent in January in the spirit of fun and curiosity, with little care for utility. Each article is simply an invitation to learn about something weird or wonderful – or often both – and to revel in the newfound knowledge, even if it has little use in daily life.

For instance, I’d long wondered why many online articles end in a cesspool of bizarre ads labelled “around the web” or “you may also like”? It turned out that these “chumbox” ads are in fact a billion-dollar business, as I learnt from digital marketing experts. Researching the topic unlocked a whole new underbelly of the Internet I’d never known about.

I enjoyed this same sense of discovery digging into the backstory of Very Dairy, a brand of “cow-free” milk that I’d seen advertised in train stations. I was surprised to find out that the “milk” was engineered from fungi in a lab, and that investors such as Temasek are betting big on such technology. A taste test with my colleagues turned out to be a fun experiment yielding hilarious reactions.

This column has allowed me to delve into other quirky phenomena – from the mysteries of our sense of smell, to the art of “biomimicry” and how scientists are trying to figure out if plants “talk” to each other.

I’ve had the privilege of meeting experts in unconventional fields: linguists who track the creative evolution of Singlish; an expert in nuclear fusion technology; and a water sommelier who opened my eyes to the colourful world of artisan waters.

Even in the ordinary, there is always something fascinating to learn about. My personal resolution for 2024 is to keep up this spirit of fun inquiry and accumulate more random bits of knowledge – never shying away from those of the “useless” variety.

If you’re mulling over your own resolutions for the new year, my hope is that you’ll consider including some “useless” pursuits among them.

As for myself, I’ll continue to seek out the weird and wonderful, and perhaps host a PowerPoint party of my own.

This column will be back in Feb, on a bimonthly schedule, with more weird and wonderful phenomena that can teach us plenty about the world we live in. We’ll go off tangent from the news and look into more curiosities in various fields, from finance and economics to science and psychology, or even beyond.