PowerPoint: "not waving but drowning"?

Power Point presentations, I realize, have an almost immediate and universal effect on me: whether the lights go off or stay on, whether I'm close enough to hear the "whrrrr" or off in the corner, it's always the same. Right when it's evident that I am about to learn something, (generally a very genuinely happy state of expectation) I look up, see the Power Point, and GLAZE OVER, at least mentally: without a mirror I can't tell if tiny little curtains actually fall down over my eyes so that others could see...has Power Point made presentations more understandable, exciting, informative?
And I wonder sometimes: as revolutionary as my computer usage has seemed, how much has it changed my workday or personal chores? Do I spend enough time looking for the password for my bank account, then signing in, that I could have written a check after all? And why are my file cabinets still full?
I got some help with the Power Point from a Mr.Edward Tufte, who basically says PowerPoint, bah, humbug! What he actually says: "...the convenience for the speaker can be costly to both content and audience...these costs result from the cognitive style characteristic of the standard PP presentation: foreshortening of evidence and thought, low spatial resolution, a deeply hierarchical single-path structure as the model for organizing every type of content, breaking up narrative and data into slides and minimal fragments, rapid temporal sequencing of then information rather than focused spatial analysis..."
Mr. Tufte DOES go on, don't you think? What's more glazing...his riff on PP or an actual presentation...and although I knew I hated Power Point, I didn't know it was because my spatial resolution was being short-changed. Spatial resolution could come to the presentation and sit right next to me and I wouldn't recognize it...
Anyway, I'm happy we can "backpack" our way into a major news story (though there may be nothing new under the sun to say, or we may have the same goofy journalist with all the right equipment now able to ask terrible, canned questions with mikes smaller than their brains), and FINALLY, the mob gets to speak, one at a time ("let's go hang him as soon as we log off..."),
but the next time I sit through a PP I swear I'll start to smell mimeograph ink...
Back to the global "wonder": are we making some of the same, eternal mistakes and dressing them up in new clothes so we can all go to the "progress" party? Am I learning...or drowning? (not waving but drowning comes from a very disturbing poem by Stevie Smith).