I read the phrase “live presentation” on a website the other day. I thought… isn’t a presentation always live?
We use the word presentation to mean the live event and the visual supports for that event. This leads us to the phrase “Can you send me your presentation?” Sending someone a set of slides that they can “read” without the presenter’s commentary suggests they are “slideuments” (see sidebar – Slideuments Anonymous).
It’s interesting that we don’t use this concept with other live events.Take theatre for example, if someone asked you to send them the play you saw last night, you would think they were out of their mind.
Go to SlideShare.net “World’s Best Presentations” contest (http://tinyurl.com/2eglj7c). There are some beautifully crafted slides and some important messages, however, are they really presentations?
What do you call these series of images with words on them? I once suggested we call them a “slideshow”, like the Huffington Post does (www.huffingtonpost.com). Arte Ranganathan of Metamorph Training (www.metamorph.webs.com) has suggested “presocuments”.
I think it’s time to find a term for this form of visual communication. It’s also time to change how we think about presentations; they are much more that a collection of slides, they are a live experience.
“When we begin to change our vocabulary, we begin to change the way we think.” – Brains on Fire
Joe Pops
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