Metaphors Matter – The Analysis of Prezi in Search of Visual-Verbal Metaphors

Abstract

In April 2014, Prezi announced that its “zooming” presentation software reached40 million users worldwide. With 30 million last October, Prezi has a record of 55,000new signups every day in the last months. To explain its skyrocketing popularity, founderspoint to the increasing global need for effective communication, which Prezi fittinglyserves with its versatility, dynamism, and visual design. In short, thinking and communicationwere 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. Thetemplates 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 presentationwill demonstrate, through the analysis of popular templates, that one key reason whyPrezi is increasingly popular is its use of metaphors. Cognitive linguistics and relateddisciplines revealed decades ago that metaphor is a core conceptual phenomena, whichgoverns thinking and communication.