Paragraph 1 - Scholes' Essay

In his essay “On Reading a Video Text” Robert Scholes comments on the new ways we process information, and how we should apply older techniques of analyzing for this information. In his first paragraph Scholes explains how the advancement in our technology is beneficial to us because it can enhance our vision and give us a new perspective on events which we may have thought we knew all there was to know. For example, slow motion can give us a new appreciation for the “mechanics of movement.” Zooming in on images takes us where we never could have gone visually before. Adding music to this can make ordinary forms of locomotion practically an art form. We can also change the coloring of images and enhance images to invoke an emotional response which may not have occurred otherwise.
Scholes believes that these changes in our normal visual processing have both positive and negative effects. On one hand, we’re enhancing our visual power. On the other hand, the images have a power over us: we continuously turn to them to relieve the boredom we all inevitably face at some point. We do this without critically thinking about what we’re viewing. Scholes continues on to describe how commercials can hold more information than we consciously realize; whether we accept this information depends on our analysis of it.