ABSTRACT
The saturation of visual representations in our lives has never been greater. As Jonathan Schroeder (2002) notes, “We live in a visual information culture… . [At] no other time in history has there been such an explosion of visual images” (p. 3). Raised with a background of television, the Internet, video games, PowerPoint presentations, YouTube, Facebook, multiplatform movies and TV episodes, and ubiquitous smartphone-captured photos and videos, the current generation of “born digital” consumers have come to expect visual images and quickly become bored with purely textual information. Stephens (1998) argues that sometime during the last third of the twentieth century images began to dominate words in terms of their power to capture and hold our attention. He explains the attraction of video in terms of its versatility, engaging techniques, and ability to provide more information in a time of shrinking attention spans:
Moving images use our senses more effectively than do black lines of type stacked on white pages. In a video there is so much more to see, not to mention hear. Moving images can cut in, cut away, dance around, superimpose, switch tone, or otherwise change perspective.
