The article deals with biological and medical metaphors in professional discourse of those who study media and information technologies. It compares two formats “specialist to specialist” and “specialist to mass audience”. It describes complex interaction between “trivial, everyday” transfers and those that are a basis for the key terminology of media studies. The article discusses some problems that arise from conceptual transfer based on the analogy while forming professional terminology, as it masks some fundamental differences between interacting domains and results in underestimation/distortion of the features, significant for the object of study.