Metaphors Matter – The Analysis of Prezi in Search of Visual-Verbal Metaphors
Abstract
In April 2014, Prezi announced that its “zooming” presentation software reached
40 million users worldwide. With 30 million last October, Prezi has a record of 55,000
new signups every day in the last months. To explain its skyrocketing popularity, founders
point to the increasing global need for effective communication, which Prezi fittingly
serves with its versatility, dynamism, and visual design. In short, thinking and communication
were given space, or rather, a spatial dimension. Prezi offers a blank canvas, a
“virtual whiteboard”, for its users to fill it with the ideas they want to share; however,
many presenters choose the pre-designed templates as bases of their presentations. The
templates not only create a framework for the presentations, like a stage, a soccer pitch,
or a road, their perculiarity is that they invoke basic metaphors, like LIFE IS A PLAY,
STRATEGIES ARE TACTICS, or LIFE IS A JOURNEY. The fundamental idea behind Prezi,
namely, that COMMUNICATION IS STORYTELLING, is already a metaphor. My presentation
will demonstrate, through the analysis of popular templates, that one key reason why
Prezi is increasingly popular is its use of metaphors. Cognitive linguistics and related
disciplines revealed decades ago that metaphor is a core conceptual phenomena, which
governs thinking and communication.
Author Biography
Anna Szlavi
Anna Szlávi
anna.szlavi@gmail.com
doctoral candidate, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest
Anna Szlávi received her Master’s Degree in American Studies, with a specialization in cognitive linguistics, and in Italian Studies, with a focus on Neo-Latin languages, at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. After spending two semesters at Central European University, Budapest, researching gender studies, she is now a PhD candidate of cultural linguistics at ELTE. In 2015 she is a Fulbright visiting researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Her interdisciplinary dissertation is concerned with the visual communication of advertisements, concentrating on the peculiarities of gender representation. As a graphics enthusiast, Anna gives talks and workshops on Prezi and presentational design.
Citation data from Crossref and Scopus
