PowerPoint is an accessible mode of persuasion. The journal articles is a more elite mode. The massive wall of text with long paragraphs; the numbered footnote

PowerPoint is an accessible mode of persuasion. The journal articles is a more elite mode. The massive wall of text with long paragraphs; the numbered footnotes; the long list of references that nobody will read; the availability of a PDF as a kind of indicator that the material is printworthy and serious; the obsessive numbering of pictures as "figures"; the use of academic shibboleths like contextualize, performative, forms of sociality, critique, etc; the refusal to summarize an argument; the namedropping of historical studies to give an impression of endless scholarly depth; the vaguely critical attitude that carefully avoids explicit moral judgments; the long-winded "narrative" form like a New Yorker reportage mixed with excerpts from monographs and textbooks. McLuhan once said that when reading texts for research, he skips the odd pages and only reads the even ones, because he had observed "a huge amount of redundancy in texts" and that having to fill out the remaining pages with his imagination kept him alert and wakeful... This article, which I enjoyed skimming, if you think about in terms of "the medium being the message", seems like a piece of advocacy for literate print culture. The authors mention designing and inventing new and interesting forms of communication and persuasion beyond PowerPoint—but their own choice of form is highly conservative.