I can relate so much… I don’t have any hearing loss and I’m in my mid 40s, but I no longer watch anything I truly need to pay attention to without captions or subtitles. In fact, I like foreign films because picture and caption is enough for my brain - it’s like I have 2 brain channels and voice is simply a distraction / noise.
I think partly it’s because English is not my native language so caption in the early days helped. I also grew up with radio (no electricity / TV) - so I mostly listened and made up my own pictures. That said, I don’t completely tune out the voice now - it’s useful for tone and inflections but I depend on captions to get the the compete picture.
Even though English is my native language I’ll always opt for subtitles for any movie or show I’m watching. It just helps to not miss anything in the story or scene, and I never even notice them. Reading them becomes completely subconscious.
Millennials are Gen Y. Gen Z are the ones just now becoming adults. I think you meant Gen X. And yes, Boomers just love to complain about every subsequent generation. I, for one, will not miss them when they're gone.
It's not just boomers complaining, if you look at the ages of the journalists behind the articles, you'll generally find it's younger journalists, approaching 30s, maybe 40s, effectively taking the crap they got and passing it down the line.
In this article's case, a quick google search shows the journalist is in their mid 20s.
We started putting captions on when our first kid was born, so we could still watch TV but have the volume down nice and low and not disturb her sleep.
It made a radical difference. We now tend to just have them on all the time. It's really mostly more modern movies and TV that we get value from it on, the audio mix is becoming such a mess with dialogue sinking in to the mix, that it's taking so much more effort to watch & listen. Put something on from 20ish years ago and the mix is totally different. That's despite having a sound system with a multiple speakers.
Most production are not made with the passable quality of reproduction that a sound bar provides in mind.
Mix are made for a THX compliant setup where the center speaker is responsible for over 50% of the dialog delivery. If you skimp on the center speaker quality and placement, the dialog mix gets muddy quite quickly.
I go to the local movie house a fair bit, and while it may not be THX certified or compliant, it's certainly not too bad. Some movies include speech that's easy to understand and others are kind of hard to hear.
Certainly, modern very thin TVs have a very uphill battle to fight, but a good center doesn't fix everything.
Not to mention that they are mixed for reference volume. If people weren’t concerned about neighbors, sleeping babies or protecting their hearing, I’m sure they would just crank it up and not miss any dialog. Of course, that’s just not possible (or enjoyable on most equipment).
I religiously have CCs turned on for everything I watch. Open Subtitles[0] is my daily staple. I sometimes miss little phrases/words in a movie, and if I miss them, the whole plot could be ruined for me and I wouldn't know what was going on. I pay attention to every word.
Two reasons from my perspective, other than my ears are getting older:
1. The sound mix has a huge dynamic range now, and lots of action scenes are mixed in with quiet conversation. Set the volume down, and you miss the dialogue. Set the volume up, and you wake up the neighbors.
2. Dialects and accents seem to be more prevalent in content, and CC helps to cut down the cognitive load of “translation” while being entertained. Frankly, I enjoy the diversity of content, but I don’t want to have to work hard to watch TV.
> 1. The sound mix has a huge dynamic range now, and lots of action scenes are mixed in with quiet conversation. Set the volume down, and you miss the dialogue. Set the volume up, and you wake up the neighbors.
I've found this really frustrating. I constantly have to control the volume when watching a movie. Commercials are also obnoxiously loud. It made me wonder whether the TV could automatically "balance" upcoming sounds so that quiet scenes are never quiet and loud ones are not too loud.
Some TVs and receivers have a night mode that does what you want. It's basically a compressor that cuts off the high peaks.
I've always been told that the ads are not really louder, that's another compression technique at work. There's no dynamic range and everything is at the top of the volume range. ( I think it amounts to the same thing )
> 1. The sound mix has a huge dynamic range now, and lots of action scenes are mixed in with quiet conversation. Set the volume down, and you miss the dialogue. Set the volume up, and you wake up the neighbors.
I was once told, by a salesperson in a TV store that this was essentially "by design" and that the solution they're taught to present is to "buy a soundbar". From his understanding, in the quest to get thinner TV manufacturers sacrificed built-in speaker size and quality, which results in the effect you describe. I am not sure how much is sales patter and how much is truth...but I bought a sound bar!
The smaller speakers in a TV naturally compress the dynamic range because they can't get loud, and especially can't get loud in the lower frequencies that travel more easily through walls. Getting good speakers actually makes the dynamic range problem worse since the loud parts get even louder and travel through walls even easier.
Soundbars have really good margins though, so it's unsurprising that that's the solution they sell!
> 1. The sound mix has a huge dynamic range now, and lots of action scenes are mixed in with quiet conversation. Set the volume down, and you miss the dialogue. Set the volume up, and you wake up the neighbors.
I've also noticed a prevalence of mixing background noise/music into dialogue scenes which often overpowers the main dialogue, or overlaps in audio range enough to make it hard to hear. Add in sub-par audio equipment, or equipment which is compelled to emphasize one end of the audio over the other - and you have a recipe for difficult to understand dialogue.
Turning on the closed captions is an easier solution than fussing with the audio in many cases.
> Dialects and accents seem to be more prevalent in content
This is why they are always on in our house. I think people who understand fine take for granted how hard accents can be.
My wife is ESL. She understands me fine, and the 'neutral tv accent.' She can't understand a word my father says(Appalachian accent). Can't understand British people, Boston accents, etc. She's learning, slowly, but I've never even thought about how amazing it is we're able to process all the different ways people speak, rather seamlessly.
Not mentioned: The increase in poor audio mixing that sounds like it was done by a monkey in addition to the prevalence of devices with speakers crammed in odd directions inside of enclosures that are in no way, shape, or form big enough to contain them. If there was one advantage of the days of big tube TVs it was you had plenty of space to also fit big speakers in too
Even on my nice 2.1 setup on my PC, I always put captions on.
It's because re-reading a word I didn't understand is much faster and easier than re-hearing (in my head) a word I didn't understand.
It's even happened with my spouse, in the same room, speaking the same dialect of American English as me, with the same accent. I mis-hear one word, and it bleeds into the next word, and I need to think for a few seconds or ask them to repeat before the sentence makes any sense to me.
Perhaps us, and the TV actors, just don't enunciate like we used to?
I think mishearing a word causes an effect that feels something like a mental mispredict leading to a pipeline flush. There's definitely a delay to refill that pipeline.
I suppose that's true. But at least most people took their headphones off when they weren't at home, which somewhat limited their exposure time. Today, when I'm outdoors, it seems like a large fraction of people are wearing earbuds. For instance when I'm riding on the bike path, I have to be alert to the fact that nearly everybody out there who's walking or jogging won't hear my signal from behind as I pass them, because they're all wearing earbuds.
Also probably because reading something is much faster than listening it. It takes just a second to visually read a sentence that is on the screen, instead of waiting for 2-3 seconds for the actor to actually say it out loud. Probably because we humans recognize words and word groups instead of letters (as how that Oxford study a few years back found out), and that's much faster.
I'd be curious to know how many speed up the videos versus cc it. I know I prefer most videos at faster speeds unless there is a lot of music in it. But cc'ing it with faster speeds is difficult.
As a side note, I think the Rings of Power would be way more enjoyable if I could just 2x it. Kind of hoping someone here will say "You can do that, just ..."
I think there will be a trend of content being made specifically with a faster playback speed in mind. I watch my 10 year old son who habitually watches videos at 2x and I can't believe that its not the same for many other kids.
I used CC for the same reason as many. Speech audio is of poor quality, back in the old days in my CRT television it wasn't a problem. Speech was clear. Now for whatever reason it's too loud for comfort if I want to hear the words. My tv has speech clarity options but it is marginal at best.
I'm using a Roku streambar with a couple of wireless speakers. Still poo audio. And I'm not convinced a system of higher cost and quality would solve it.
I have a hard time believing this. Captions demand more attention if anything. I can passively "watch" a video by only listening to the audio, but I can't passively read.
I think that the phenomenon described in the article may actually be a symptom of a much deeper social change. Listening and auditory comprehension were critical skills for communication and preservation of knowledge in prehistory. Spoken word is inherently ephemeral. As civilizations developed or adopted writing systems, and the population became increasingly literate, text supplanted spoken communication and oral history in many areas. There are many obvious benefits to that change, but I believe that we also inadvertently sacrificed our listening and auditory comprehension skills in the process over many generations.
Text messaging/SMS is increasingly preferred to phone calls, with many of the younger generations experiencing high levels of anxiety if they're required to call someone.
This is completely anecdotal, but I've also observed several others who are unable to follow verbal navigation instructions - either spoken from another person or even live step by step instructions from a navigation app. They only feel confident if there's a visual representation.
I think we've mistakenly classified that behavior as having a "visual learning style", when it is more accurately the result of our species losing its ability to process auditory language.
This is an interesting take actually.. If we can assume that younger generations spend more time communicating electronically via some form of text messaging, at least the majority so, are you saying that that just becomes the "default" form of communication naturally?
Where are older generations would have spend far more time communicating verbally..
That makes some sense to me anyway. Would be super interesting to see some further studies done. And to philosophise the results that could mean.
I was thinking along those lines, yeah. Extrapolating that out, I can imagine a future where writing is the only form of language. It'd make for some interesting dystopian fiction, if nothing else.
I'd be interested in some formal studies as well. My thoughts aren't well researched or anything. Just ideas.
> I have a hard time believing this. Captions demand more attention if anything. I can passively "watch" a video by only listening to the audio, but I can't passively read.
I do this. I can parse what is happening on screen and read the captions in a fraction of the time the thing actually plays out, then I got a few seconds to do something else. Usually I would be reading HN or something while I tune out the video for a few seconds, before glancing at it again to catch the next bit.
Listening to a video and reading something else at the same time doesn't work for me. When I do that, I usually forget what I was reading or miss something in the video. Interleaving works much better for me.
Also I don't normally do that, just when there's some particularly boring part that I don't want to skip but which doesn't demand my undivided attention.
> I do this. I can parse what is happening on screen and read the captions in a fraction of the time the thing actually plays out, then I got a few seconds to do something else. Usually I would be reading HN or something while I tune out the video for a few seconds, before glancing at it again to catch the next bit.
That kind of context switching really does sound terrible to me. In my case, I speed up the content itself by 3 to 5x speed so that I can process more information at once and any boring bits are basically sped through. It's helped me retain a lot more information than simply watching at 1x speed.
I think you're right in absolute terms, that captions require more attention than audio generally, that's only true if you're choosing one or the other, when most people are doing both.
With audio, if you missed a word, because you were focussing on something else for a moment, you have to rewind. If you have captions on, you can glance quickly at the screen, read the word or two that you missed, allowing you to 'recover'.
That allows you to pay even less active attention to the audio, because you know you can always 'error-correct' later.
I can read considerably faster than people speak. I can keep up with a scene by glancing at the image and reading the text while focused on something else primarily. I can’t do that with audio.
I won't pretend I'm fully multitasking, but sometimes I want a comfort show on in the background that I've seen before while I play a game on my phone/iPad. In those cases it's nice to be able to look up and see what was said if you just missed part of it. But I also leave subs on 100% the time I'm normally watching for the obvious reason of not missing anything, it's not just for background TV.
It's not so much the verbal aspect rather than the memory aspect. Written instructions are more soothing because you can refer to them verbatim and they stand no risk of being forgotten.
It's simpler than this. If you're watching a movie/show on a phone or laptop in a shared area, it'll probably be at low volume, so you can't hear the dialog. I've watched entire series with CC for exactly this reason.
With social media videos, CC is even more important cause nobody wants their phone making noise in public, and any wise app will mute by default anyway.
I disagree, I have a harder time paying attention to people speaking than reading. Reading is faster, much faster than waiting for people finish a sentence.
Then again, maybe you're right, I don't process auditory language and when I was in university, I skipped classes to instead read the textbook back to back without a teacher distracting me by yammering around.
I can browse my phone/watch instagram videos with a NFLX show playing. If something interesting happens I can look up and quickly catch up on the dialogue by reading the caption.
> Captions demand more attention if anything. I can passively "watch" a video by only listening to the audio, but I can't passively read.
If the dialogue is 60dB below the explosions and you're doing something like cooking with a 70dB noise floor and 80dB peaks, then you have zero chance of getting the dialogue without blowing out your windows.
> Captions demand more attention if anything. I can passively "watch" a video by only listening to the audio, but I can't passively read.
If the dialogue is 60dB below the explosions (or even the music at times) and you're doing something like cooking with a 70dB noise floor and 80dB peaks, then you have zero chance of getting the dialogue without blowing out your windows.
Not in that age group but I can't imagine not having cc on. I was hooked when watching anime and foreign movies but even with english movies they only have an upside. You don't have to guess what word they said or how someone's name is spelled. Loud scenes where you can barely hear them is one but also when you have characters that have accents or switch to a different language it helps (you don't get distracted by the sudden need to read cc).
You have to get used to it but it only takes a few tries.
I’m also not in that age group (I’m late 30s) but I’ve been watching TV and movies with closed captioning enabled since I was a kid and have found that it helps my comprehension of what’s going on with plot lines, etc, immensely. Maybe I’m just a stronger reader than listener, but I’m at the point where I vastly prefer to watch movies at home rather than at a theater because I can have CC on by default.
I’ve also always had CC on for my kid and they’re an excellent reader. I don’t have any concrete evidence for it but part of me thinks their strong reading skills are partly due to that.
One downside of having captions on all the time is that forced subtitles when characters are speaking a foreign language in an otherwise native language show are usually burned into the actual video stream instead of being in the same text file that the normal subtitles pull from, so a lot of lazy captions providers will put something like "<Walter speaking Spanish>" in the captions, which will then be displayed over the same space the burned in subtitles are for the entirety of the time they are speaking, meaning I have to rewind, turn off subtitles, rewatch the scene, then re enable the subtitles if I want to actual know what is going on.
I've thought about this many times as well as it does suck to have it spoiled, especially if there is a long pause in the scene but the subs have been up revealing the joke/jump-scare/etc for a few seconds already. In the end I enjoy subs too much to turn them off for that reason but every time it happens I do wish the "reveal" in the subs was held until the reveal in the scene.
Tangential: I’ve found subtitles to be a very useful tool for learning a language. In order of challenge, I’ll at least watch everything in English with Spanish subtitles, then Spanish SAP with English subtitles, then Spanish SAP with Spanish subtitles, then just in Spanish.
I discovered something amusing about this. When I was living in Spain 20 years ago, my Spanish (ex-) wife and I bought a DVD collection of Friends. At first we'd watch it in English with Spanish captions so my ex could get the subtleties, then as her English improved, we'd watch it with English captions which helped with words she was unfamiliar with. Then we started doing the reverse, Spanish overdub with English captions so I could practice.
But when it came time for me to try Spanish overdub with Spanish captions, it turned out that the scripts had obviously been translated by two different companies, and what was said could be wildly different from what was written. Hysterically bad differences - to the point of completely changing the sentiment of something that was said. Mostly it was with insults or expressions, which could have various ways of translating, but sometimes they changed entire plot points, especially when a character's relationship with another was ambiguous. An aunt could be just a friend, or a sister-in-law could be a co-worker. It was so confusing, after a little while I just turned off the captions completely. Since I had seen all the shows at least once, it wasn't a problem.
A fun thing to do on Disney Plus is change between the various Spanish regions to see how they overdub characters. I did this for Guardians of the Galaxy and it's fantastic how Rocket would go from being a Mexicano gangster to a Spanish thug.
I see that a lot on Netflix, I like to watch with the captions on but not for the foreign stuff with English dubbing. Squid Games is one that comes to mind where I'd have to turn the captions off because the mismatch between the english audio and captions was too distracting for me.
Or Baltimore slang, like when I tried to watch The Wire back in the day.
It was actually the show that I first turned on subs for and I usually keep them on now out of habit. I found the thick local accents hard to understand which is rare for me, and I didn't know if words were just slang or I'd misheard. Throw in a bunch of unique names to the mix too (I can rarely remember someone's name anyway after an introduction until I read it) as well as a few mumbley characters. Great show but I needed help.
I've been using it with Netflix and YouTube to study a couple of languages, with really good results.
The gist is that it adds dual-language subtitles, translation/dictionary tools, precise subtitle-based playback controls etc to the player UI.
It can also colour-code every word based on its frequency in the language and on whether I already know it or am actively trying to learn it. This makes it very easy to identify common words I don't yet know and make them the focus of my vocab learning.
The main shortcomings (for me) are:
1. Word translations are sometimes weird (but then I can get to a real dictionary with two clicks).
2. It does not understand grammar (e.g. separable prefixes in German).
3. Different forms of the same word are sometimes treated as unrelated words for the purposes of colour-coding (e.g. the infinitive and Präteritum for some verbs).
4. Word frequency highlighting (e.g. highlight the 1500 most common words) is configured globally rather than per-language.
5. TurtleTube sounds cool but I find the contents a bit meh and the levelling inconsistent. I have found a couple of great YouTube channels through it though.
6. Local file playback requires an SRT file and can only play the default audio track. The former is no biggie but the latter completely breaks the feature for me (since the default audio track is usually English and not the language I'm learning).
7. Plex integration would make it even more useful.
Another reason that I can think of is that many people are watching content at a increased playback rate. I personally limit that to education content because for things like comedy it can mess with pacing. But I have friends that have used it while watching really long shows. It doesn't have to be much faster but if you think about a 10 hour series, that is approximately an hour saved. I recognize that this seems odd, but I have tried it on some shows and it honestly makes them more enjoyable. It's not universal to every show or to every person.
I watch everything on 1.4x, but I would watch it faster if it wouldn't run into buffering issues and get glitchy. Podcasts are normally 2.2x.
I just find I enjoy taking the information in more when I can do it quickly. If my brain has no trouble operating at that speed, I might as well take advantage of the chance to get more new ideas in my head!
Same here. Many movies are nice but slow; watching at 1.5× speed makes it a better experience. But then it becomes difficult to understand some dialogs, so I turn CC on.
I do that too - 1.5x seems to be the minimum I'll start with, and sometimes I'll go as high as 2.5x. Having subs definitely helps at the upper end of the range.
On the other hand, the downside is that when you interact with people in realtime, you constantly feel like they're speaking too slowly, and others have trouble understanding what feels like a normal speed of talking for you.
I’m also a big fan of watching with CC (sometimes it can be genuinely hard to pick up what someone says and it can be key dialogue). However anything in the comedy genre is the exception since CC ruin the timing of the jokes.
I absolutely get the worry (and reality) of jokes being ruined. In the end I bite the bullet because of the same reason I want CC's on all the time: I just miss or mishear things when I don't, sometimes to the point I don't understand the joke.
That said, sometimes subs (from places like OpenSubtitles) are laughable bad in that they don't know the "in-universe" words for a show (comedy or otherwise) and do best-guesses/phonetic spellings of things they aren't sure of which is it's own issue.
Closed Captions are more available now through settings, great audio <> text models, exposure of people to foreign language films and shows, etc. The 20-somethings are exposed to it more and adopt to using them. Youtube's closed captions are both a noticeable button and a "c" keyboard shortcut.
I grew up with Dutch subs and later English subs on the beeb (you could use teletext for that back in the day – maybe you still can?) in my teens. Then I watched stuff without subs for years just fine; I managed to watch Shameless without subs years ago (which was a bit hard at times; stuff didn't commonly come with subs back then). I turned on subs for The Expanse as the belter dialect was difficult to follow at times, and I've used it regularly ever since. It just makes things a tad easier; no more "wait, what did he say? ah well, whatever" At times it also makes things a bit easier to skip ahead when things aren't all that interesting.
The fact that there's a claimed generational gap here speaks more to the values of the generations re: passive vs active entertainment. I could also ask: "Why do all these 60-Somethings have the TV on as background noise while doing other tasks?"
To me it seems closed-caption usage is correlated with actually paying attention to television consumption.
People who have their TV on at all hours, as background entertainment to support their lifestyle, tend to not use CC. Why should they? The words literally don't matter, it's just an aesthetic.
People who actually desire an immersive experience, who deliberately pay attention to the shows they watch, tend to care about CC since it complements the audio & visual nicely. I don't have any evidence for this but I'd wager that plot synthesis and comprehension of television shows is greatly improved by CC. Or maybe it's that people who use CC tend to value and perform better at synthesis and comprehension? Regardless of causality, CC seems related to an individual's desire for more active entertainment.
I use CC even in my native language especially when I background watch. It's easy to work while watching a tv show (only works with relatively boring work) if I know I can quickly glance at the subtitles if I missed anything.
What kind of work can you do while watching? You're just doing two things badly. Unless you mean physical work that doesn't engage the mind like cleaning or doing the dishes?
With television you turn it on and there are a few mediocre choices you can tune out. On streaming platforms you have to specifically select a program to watch. When Gen Z watches/listens to something in the background it's much more likely to be a long YouTube video or a podcast.
> [CC] complements the audio & visual nicely. I don't have any evidence for this but I'd wager that plot synthesis and comprehension of television shows is greatly improved by CC
As you say, you don't have any evidence for this, so I'll just add that my subjective impression is the absolute opposite. I find it impossible to concentrate on what is happening visually on screen in a film when closed captions are on.
I associate CC with the one place I ever see them - at the laundromat, where they are always on because you can't hear the TV clearly above the background noise. Hard to think of a setting where "background entertainment" is a better descriptor.
I think it depends on your reading speed and ability to skim. If you can read faster than people can talk, subtitles aren't really distracting because you can glance down and then go back to reading the visual expressions and background details of the dialogue.
As non english-native speaker I watched so much stuff with captions it's second nature for me.
But for any language that I understand well I only turn them on when the accent is so thick I can't get what the actors are saying.
Similarly I always turn on all subtitles in video games because it's easy to miss something if say ingame explosion or other sound effect covers the voice, or it is just too silent (say NPC talking that's a bit far)
But the article claim it helps multitasking seems weird - how having to look at screen would help when multitasking?
> But the article claim it helps multitasking seems weird - how having to look at screen would help when multitasking?
You have the audio on and are doing something else with your eyes. You don't quite hear something that's been said, glance at the screen, read the captions to fill in what was missed, return your eyes to your other task.
If it was audio only, you missed whatever it was, and have to live with it or replay a little bit of content. Going back a few seconds is often a UI challenge not worth the gained context, IMHO, but if it happens a lot, might as well not be watching anything.
There are a number of tasks that have varying noise levels, yet aren't so involved that you can't keep glancing at the screen. Washing dishes, for example.
I'm from Europe so used to subtitles from early age. My wife is Canadian, and first little while of our dating was bewildered with subtitles.
Now though, literally all my Canadian in-laws use subtitles, intergenerationalLy - they're used to them, and addicted to knowing what the heck is going on :)
I mean, I do "try" in the sense that about half the movies I watch are foreign, and therefore require subtitles. Despite this, I really do feel that I miss out on a lot of what is happening in terms of cinematography and creative directorial choices because I'm spending about 1/3 to 1/2 of the time reading the subtitles.
>I find it impossible to concentrate on what is happening visually on screen in a film when closed captions are on.
This is a skill. I would have agreed with you 20 years ago but at some point I started putting them on because I could only afford a shitty audio setup and dramas got really mumbly. Took a while, but I learned to not be distracted by the subtitles.
They mix sound differently now as well. I can’t follow speech in many shows and movies because voice volume is low and the background crap is too high.
I wish there was a CC mode for “I’m not deaf, I just don’t catch the quiet mumbly dialog sometimes so give me captions only of the dialog.”
Bonus if it’s delayed by exactly 2 seconds, so that it doesn’t spoil jokes, and I can quickly reference it if I missed something someone said (helping me avoid fixating on the captions.)
Because it’s the CC descriptions of music swells and things like “[laughs] and “[crying]”, etc that are distracting for me, and not needed.
What’s worse, sometimes they ruin comedic timing by putting the punchline on the screen before the setup has finished (or logical equivalent of a punchline… comedy is often found in timing) and the captions ruin the timing.
There is on some shows. For those the choice is between "English" and "English [CC]" or similar; the former omits descriptions of noises. Most don't have this, probably because it's not provided by the producers.
Agreed on timing issues. This also seems to vary by show/producer.
There usually is (but not always). It is something like English vs English [for hearing impaired].
As a non-native English speaker I’m used to watching most television and movies with subtitles. The extra sound descriptions don’t bother me too much actually. Sometimes it is kind of funny actually, it is a running joke in my home to count the times a show has [ominous music].
That’s the difference between subtitles and closed captions: one is for people who don’t speak that language but can hear in general, the other is for people who can’t hear at all.
> Bonus if it’s delayed by exactly 2 seconds, so that it doesn’t spoil jokes, and I can quickly reference it if I missed something someone said (helping me avoid fixating on the captions.)
This is the exact reason why I vastly prefer playing media on my own media player. I have it set to always delay subtitles by exactly 2 seconds. I even have the font overridden to use a nice geometric sans (Josefin Sans, to be exact); subtitles with bitmap fonts (like they are on DVD and Blu-ray) are disabled outright.
Every time there's a new person watching something with me, they comment on the subtitle delay. It usually starts with a complaint that the subs are off-sync. Never had someone (yet) stick to that complaint though, after this explanation. But, nobody I've met has previously recognised a need for such a delay, either. Until they watch something with me, of course.
> Bonus if it’s delayed by exactly 2 seconds, so that it doesn’t spoil jokes, and I can quickly reference it if I missed something someone said (helping me avoid fixating on the captions.)
I think that'd ruin me more than not having subtitles at all, because I just get stuck at reading the subtitles all the time if they are on (which, I have on 99% of the time). I go so far to avoid content that doesn't have subtitles.
What I'd love to have, would be a "speed-reading" version of subtitles, that just show each word individually as it's spoken (or maybe two/three) instead of the full sentence. That way it can still be in sync, while not ruining punchlines. Would be a real hassle to actually write/make the subtitles though, but with all the AI/ML around today, there is probably a way to automate it.
3Play Media's format could do this. Their output is usually a transcript where you can click on any word and it will take you to that second of the video. The software they've developed for the people who create the captions does go second by second as well.
I don't know if they've ever considered having that as a display option. They're just one of the only companies I can think of for whom it wouldn't involve a whole rethinking of how they create the captions.
> Because it’s the CC descriptions of music swells and things like “[laughs] and “[crying]”, etc that are distracting for me, and not needed.
This drives me nuts too, especially when they're being subjective and I'm asking myself things like 'Was that music really "ominous"? Didn't seem that way...'
Another thing that bugs me is when captions reveal a character's name to indicate who is speaking when the name of that character hasn't actually been revealed in the story yet.
This aligns pretty well with McLuhan's concept of cool and hot media [0]. The younger generations prefer it cool - perhaps their hotness is found in newer forms like video games.
This is an insightful observation but also feels incomplete and outdated. They use hot and cold to distinguish between "one sense" and "all senses", for some reason, which doesn't quite match modern media.
But I definitely agree that there is something to it, and video games occupy a different niche of entertainment than movies for me. Video games are a pastime and a hobby, movies and shows are not unlike books: I don't want to miss a single piece of the action.
When I have dinner I watch something off Youtube. Movie time is after dinner when I can give my full attention to it.
For context, I'm in my mid-30s and grew up playing video games. When doing chores I listen to podcasts or audio books.
I really like to think of media consumption in terms of attentional pressure. How long can you not pay attention without "missing something". For movies and TV shows it seems like 15 seconds, plus or minus depending on the content itself. Chatty podcasts give you 30 seconds or a minute.
I enjoy the fast video games I play (shoutout to Deep Rock Galactic, killer PVE FPS with a non-toxic player base!) because they modulate their attentional pressure and ratchet it up intensely at moments. It feels great to handle a situation where even a subsecond lapse in attention would result in failure.
From wikipedia: Cool media are those that require high participation from users, due to their low definition (the receiver/user must fill in missing information). Since many senses may be used, they foster involvement. Conversely, hot media are low in audience participation due to their high resolution or definition.
Seems like it's hard to place fast video games? You don't have to fill in much of anything (hot) but they require full participation (cool).
One of the things I love about podcasts is the ability to titrate the playback speed multiplier as a means of selecting a context appropriate window of permissible inattention. Sitting in an airline seat 3x… driving to an unfamiliar urban destination 1.25x.
I think it's not as universal as you believe. I personally use closed captioning as a crutch when I'm half-ass watching something, because if my mind wanders and I miss hearing a line I can usually just read it without having to pause and rewind.
If I'm actually fully immersed in the movie or whatever, and I can understand the dialogue, then I don't need the captions and I leave them off.
>To me it seems closed-caption usage is correlated with actually paying attention to television consumption.
The alternative is that the new generation has no ability to focus on anything and needs the same information piped to their brain through both their eyes and ears. Up next: smellovision captions.
Your tone is a little smug here. If I’m paying attention to something I’m watching on TV, I can hear the dialogue. I want to be able to actually watch the performances of the actors, or whatever else is on the screen, instead of reading captions.
I'm a native English speaker and grew up mostly overseas in non-English speaking countries. Subtitles helped me understand American slang and conversational English that I wasn't used to hearing at home. I've also always struggled with distinctly understanding dialogue in films. It never had anything to do with active vs passive viewing. Another reason I always had them on was because I grew up in apartments and was always mindful of my noise levels for my neighbors. Using subtitles let me actively consume the film without worrying about bothering people around me. Now as an adult subtitles are my default for all media when available and I prefer it.
This whole framing is bull. People who grew up without closed captions are just used to watching a show without it. For them, it’s distracting to constantly have words to look down and read when they are trying to pay attention to what is happening on the screen. Like trying to read the words on every single road sign when you drive somewhere.
You may notice that in movie theaters—the most focused and immersive watching experience there is—they don’t show captions except maybe when translating foreign language.
Or you may not, if you only watch movies at home on your TV.
The bullshit framing is that there is any correlation between having CC on, and how closely the viewer is paying attention to the show or movie. There is not, as evidenced by a century of cinema and TV.
Movies originally had captions, because there was no dialogue track. As soon as they figured out synchronized sound, the captions went away. Even if people were paying very close attention.
> You may notice that in movie theaters—the most focused and immersive watching experience there is
Movie theaters have the same influence on a mind as any other experience of collective attention. It keeps your attention aligned with attention of a crowd. It may be a case of herd behavior, or it may be something special, I dont know, but it works.
I believe that this collective attention is the main reason why movie threaters are still profitable. But not just it: surroundings associated with attention on a screen and all these rituals, like eating pop corn, also do their part as stimuli leading to a learned response. You get highly focused attention without any conscious effort. You need conscious to fight it and to divert attention from a screen.
But it doesn't matter when you try to watch a movie or a lecture at home. Despite of all your experience of collective attention it would be much harder to keep your attention focused.
No, that's not it. I grew up with literally everything in English being subtitled. Always hated it, but all I can do is make an effort to not have my eyes there.
Even some DVDs did not have the option to turn off subtitles. I never had subtitles on for anything that gave me the option. (I even bought DVDs from overseas occasionally to not get subtitles)
But now every other show is frequently incomprehensible.
Either they've put lead in the drinking water, making us all not understand the spoken word, or they've made dialog audio shit.
> You may notice that in movie theaters—the most focused and immersive watching experience there is—they don’t show captions except maybe when translating foreign language.
Well, it just tells you come from the English speaking country. For the rest of us, subtitles in a movie theatre are among most normal things in the world.
You’re right - except I don’t think there are many countries where national movie industry can seriously compete with international (predominantly American). Therefore, subtitles are a standard for your movie going experience.
Closed captioning only very recently become not crap. It used to be mainly served as those black bars with white text coming in about 30 seconds too late and with ridiculous typos.
Well sure if the actors mumble all the time trying to appear enigmatic, the comprehension is surely greatly improved. I m not american and often i find it very hard to listen to what is said in tv series/movies. This is a new trend in acting btw, older TV was not like that.
Older people are more likely to be alone and the TV helps to break the silence. TV is usually tv shows where people speak properly so that helps i guess
In the past, that line needed to come in loud and clear, or people would just miss it, probably forever. Now, we can rewind, or of course turn on subtitles, so there's not as much pressure on the audio finishing to be super clear.
Sounds right - my parents (early 70s) don't pay attention to what they are watching even tho watching TV is the only thing they are doing at that time. They both even regularly fall asleep watching TV/movies at night and literally don't care that they missed most of the show/movie they were "watching." They aren't interested in watching the parts they slept through in the morning.
If you have audio on, you can't so easily ignore ads. It's intrusive.
Also, for those who think viewers are morally obligated to watch ads, my experience has been that if I don't click the "Skip Ad" button, I will keep getting more ads and never get to the feature!
This is one (of many to be fair) reasons I quite dislike the theater. Others being "free" food/drinks, my dog, my comfortable couch, pausing, and my bathroom. I've wondered before if they could give people special glasses (a la 3D glasses) that would show the "hidden" subtitles at the bottom. But even that wouldn't get me back in a theater.
This!! Most speakers/soundbars suck, and if you don't have a center channel in your sound system, voices will wash out with the background noise/music since the speaker (as in person speaking) is usually the focus of the shot and mostly audible in the center channel.
There's supposed to be sound engineers on every show/movie to make sure it sounds good but the gap lies between your audio system and the reference systems they use. A good analogy is the infamous Game of Thrones battle that was too dark. They edited that episode on reference grade monitors where you could see what was happening, but the average lower end tv and viewing environment couldn't translate the same black levels and details that the editor's had seen when they worked those scenes (they were also intemtionally edited to look dark and chaotic on the reference grade monitors*, which added to the problem)
That being said I still use cc with a lot of content. I think it would be less prevalent though if it were not for the gaping holes in most audio setups.
I always have subtitles on in games. Especially since I find it hard to focus on the words being spoken and video game cutscenes are almost always unable to be rewound. During gameplay it's harder to read and play at the same time though, although over the years it's gotten easier.
Through my years of watching Anime it's also quite easy for me to watch and read at the same time.
I think for watching movies they can be useful too, because it feels like almost every movie coming out now has terrible audio mixing for the average person. Even the audio mixing in a Dolby Atmos theatre doesn't seem right. If you watch any modern film mastered in Dobly Atmos on a TV with a sound bar you will have a bad time. You'll have a worse time if you're watching with just the TV speakers.
I had to buy a 3.1 bar just to get a center channel. Basically one of us couldn't make out voices without it, and there were a couple movies/shows where it was just unwatchable. I'm not sure why things like Apple TV can't do a more credible job remixing the audio for 2 speakers.
I bought my TV in part based on reviews for audio quality. And while that’s certainly part of the equation, this has just been getting worse the last few years.
I have them on for games so I can read the conversation and skip to the next sentence. For open world RPG games that are 50+ hours long it really helps staying engaged, as some quest lines are not that interesting and I like to complete all side quests.
I've found that a lot of games initially start with subtitles on. I usually switch them off pretty quickly. I'm not used to them and they break the immersion for me.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 502 ms ] threadI think partly it’s because English is not my native language so caption in the early days helped. I also grew up with radio (no electricity / TV) - so I mostly listened and made up my own pictures. That said, I don’t completely tune out the voice now - it’s useful for tone and inflections but I depend on captions to get the the compete picture.
Plays to some stereotypes at least.
In this article's case, a quick google search shows the journalist is in their mid 20s.
It made a radical difference. We now tend to just have them on all the time. It's really mostly more modern movies and TV that we get value from it on, the audio mix is becoming such a mess with dialogue sinking in to the mix, that it's taking so much more effort to watch & listen. Put something on from 20ish years ago and the mix is totally different. That's despite having a sound system with a multiple speakers.
Mix are made for a THX compliant setup where the center speaker is responsible for over 50% of the dialog delivery. If you skimp on the center speaker quality and placement, the dialog mix gets muddy quite quickly.
Certainly, modern very thin TVs have a very uphill battle to fight, but a good center doesn't fix everything.
[0] https://www.opensubtitles.org/en/search/subs
Also if we're watching something with loud ads (Hulu), we'd rather have the show be quiet and have CC on then have to constantly adjust the volume.
1. The sound mix has a huge dynamic range now, and lots of action scenes are mixed in with quiet conversation. Set the volume down, and you miss the dialogue. Set the volume up, and you wake up the neighbors.
2. Dialects and accents seem to be more prevalent in content, and CC helps to cut down the cognitive load of “translation” while being entertained. Frankly, I enjoy the diversity of content, but I don’t want to have to work hard to watch TV.
I've found this really frustrating. I constantly have to control the volume when watching a movie. Commercials are also obnoxiously loud. It made me wonder whether the TV could automatically "balance" upcoming sounds so that quiet scenes are never quiet and loud ones are not too loud.
I've always been told that the ads are not really louder, that's another compression technique at work. There's no dynamic range and everything is at the top of the volume range. ( I think it amounts to the same thing )
I was once told, by a salesperson in a TV store that this was essentially "by design" and that the solution they're taught to present is to "buy a soundbar". From his understanding, in the quest to get thinner TV manufacturers sacrificed built-in speaker size and quality, which results in the effect you describe. I am not sure how much is sales patter and how much is truth...but I bought a sound bar!
It's not "by design" so much as bad audio setups are going to sound bad, and a lot of people don't know how to shop for or care about it.
Soundbars have really good margins though, so it's unsurprising that that's the solution they sell!
I've also noticed a prevalence of mixing background noise/music into dialogue scenes which often overpowers the main dialogue, or overlaps in audio range enough to make it hard to hear. Add in sub-par audio equipment, or equipment which is compelled to emphasize one end of the audio over the other - and you have a recipe for difficult to understand dialogue.
Turning on the closed captions is an easier solution than fussing with the audio in many cases.
This is why they are always on in our house. I think people who understand fine take for granted how hard accents can be.
My wife is ESL. She understands me fine, and the 'neutral tv accent.' She can't understand a word my father says(Appalachian accent). Can't understand British people, Boston accents, etc. She's learning, slowly, but I've never even thought about how amazing it is we're able to process all the different ways people speak, rather seamlessly.
It's because re-reading a word I didn't understand is much faster and easier than re-hearing (in my head) a word I didn't understand.
It's even happened with my spouse, in the same room, speaking the same dialect of American English as me, with the same accent. I mis-hear one word, and it bleeds into the next word, and I need to think for a few seconds or ask them to repeat before the sentence makes any sense to me.
Perhaps us, and the TV actors, just don't enunciate like we used to?
As a side note, I think the Rings of Power would be way more enjoyable if I could just 2x it. Kind of hoping someone here will say "You can do that, just ..."
I'm using a Roku streambar with a couple of wireless speakers. Still poo audio. And I'm not convinced a system of higher cost and quality would solve it.
I have a hard time believing this. Captions demand more attention if anything. I can passively "watch" a video by only listening to the audio, but I can't passively read.
I think that the phenomenon described in the article may actually be a symptom of a much deeper social change. Listening and auditory comprehension were critical skills for communication and preservation of knowledge in prehistory. Spoken word is inherently ephemeral. As civilizations developed or adopted writing systems, and the population became increasingly literate, text supplanted spoken communication and oral history in many areas. There are many obvious benefits to that change, but I believe that we also inadvertently sacrificed our listening and auditory comprehension skills in the process over many generations.
Text messaging/SMS is increasingly preferred to phone calls, with many of the younger generations experiencing high levels of anxiety if they're required to call someone.
This is completely anecdotal, but I've also observed several others who are unable to follow verbal navigation instructions - either spoken from another person or even live step by step instructions from a navigation app. They only feel confident if there's a visual representation.
I think we've mistakenly classified that behavior as having a "visual learning style", when it is more accurately the result of our species losing its ability to process auditory language.
Where are older generations would have spend far more time communicating verbally..
That makes some sense to me anyway. Would be super interesting to see some further studies done. And to philosophise the results that could mean.
I'd be interested in some formal studies as well. My thoughts aren't well researched or anything. Just ideas.
I do this. I can parse what is happening on screen and read the captions in a fraction of the time the thing actually plays out, then I got a few seconds to do something else. Usually I would be reading HN or something while I tune out the video for a few seconds, before glancing at it again to catch the next bit.
Listening to a video and reading something else at the same time doesn't work for me. When I do that, I usually forget what I was reading or miss something in the video. Interleaving works much better for me.
Also I don't normally do that, just when there's some particularly boring part that I don't want to skip but which doesn't demand my undivided attention.
That kind of context switching really does sound terrible to me. In my case, I speed up the content itself by 3 to 5x speed so that I can process more information at once and any boring bits are basically sped through. It's helped me retain a lot more information than simply watching at 1x speed.
With audio, if you missed a word, because you were focussing on something else for a moment, you have to rewind. If you have captions on, you can glance quickly at the screen, read the word or two that you missed, allowing you to 'recover'.
That allows you to pay even less active attention to the audio, because you know you can always 'error-correct' later.
With social media videos, CC is even more important cause nobody wants their phone making noise in public, and any wise app will mute by default anyway.
Then again, maybe you're right, I don't process auditory language and when I was in university, I skipped classes to instead read the textbook back to back without a teacher distracting me by yammering around.
If the dialogue is 60dB below the explosions and you're doing something like cooking with a 70dB noise floor and 80dB peaks, then you have zero chance of getting the dialogue without blowing out your windows.
If the dialogue is 60dB below the explosions (or even the music at times) and you're doing something like cooking with a 70dB noise floor and 80dB peaks, then you have zero chance of getting the dialogue without blowing out your windows.
You have to get used to it but it only takes a few tries.
I’ve also always had CC on for my kid and they’re an excellent reader. I don’t have any concrete evidence for it but part of me thinks their strong reading skills are partly due to that.
I wonder if delaying joke/punchline subtitles till after the spoken line is complete would improve this
But when it came time for me to try Spanish overdub with Spanish captions, it turned out that the scripts had obviously been translated by two different companies, and what was said could be wildly different from what was written. Hysterically bad differences - to the point of completely changing the sentiment of something that was said. Mostly it was with insults or expressions, which could have various ways of translating, but sometimes they changed entire plot points, especially when a character's relationship with another was ambiguous. An aunt could be just a friend, or a sister-in-law could be a co-worker. It was so confusing, after a little while I just turned off the captions completely. Since I had seen all the shows at least once, it wasn't a problem.
A fun thing to do on Disney Plus is change between the various Spanish regions to see how they overdub characters. I did this for Guardians of the Galaxy and it's fantastic how Rocket would go from being a Mexicano gangster to a Spanish thug.
It was actually the show that I first turned on subs for and I usually keep them on now out of habit. I found the thick local accents hard to understand which is rare for me, and I didn't know if words were just slang or I'd misheard. Throw in a bunch of unique names to the mix too (I can rarely remember someone's name anyway after an introduction until I read it) as well as a few mumbley characters. Great show but I needed help.
I've been using it with Netflix and YouTube to study a couple of languages, with really good results.
The gist is that it adds dual-language subtitles, translation/dictionary tools, precise subtitle-based playback controls etc to the player UI.
It can also colour-code every word based on its frequency in the language and on whether I already know it or am actively trying to learn it. This makes it very easy to identify common words I don't yet know and make them the focus of my vocab learning.
The main shortcomings (for me) are:
But overall, what an amazing tool.I just find I enjoy taking the information in more when I can do it quickly. If my brain has no trouble operating at that speed, I might as well take advantage of the chance to get more new ideas in my head!
On the other hand, the downside is that when you interact with people in realtime, you constantly feel like they're speaking too slowly, and others have trouble understanding what feels like a normal speed of talking for you.
That said, sometimes subs (from places like OpenSubtitles) are laughable bad in that they don't know the "in-universe" words for a show (comedy or otherwise) and do best-guesses/phonetic spellings of things they aren't sure of which is it's own issue.
It does.
I guess I figured that as the TikTok aesthetic and never even really thought more than that.
To me it seems closed-caption usage is correlated with actually paying attention to television consumption.
People who have their TV on at all hours, as background entertainment to support their lifestyle, tend to not use CC. Why should they? The words literally don't matter, it's just an aesthetic.
People who actually desire an immersive experience, who deliberately pay attention to the shows they watch, tend to care about CC since it complements the audio & visual nicely. I don't have any evidence for this but I'd wager that plot synthesis and comprehension of television shows is greatly improved by CC. Or maybe it's that people who use CC tend to value and perform better at synthesis and comprehension? Regardless of causality, CC seems related to an individual's desire for more active entertainment.
I'm a background watcher for sure, and this trend with CC suggests to me that the whole "2nd screen" thing isn't playing with the younger generation.
Any insights as to why that may be?
To give more context, I was always a "background media" person. Even as a kid I'd draw while in front of the TV, I was never a focused participant.
As you say, you don't have any evidence for this, so I'll just add that my subjective impression is the absolute opposite. I find it impossible to concentrate on what is happening visually on screen in a film when closed captions are on.
I associate CC with the one place I ever see them - at the laundromat, where they are always on because you can't hear the TV clearly above the background noise. Hard to think of a setting where "background entertainment" is a better descriptor.
I think practice helped, but so did reducing the size of the video frame. Turns out having the whole frame in my field of view was a big deal.
Goku: AHHHHHH!
Vegeta: ARGHHHH!
Goku: OOOMPH!!!
Vegta: HMMMMM!
The visuals were just as simple. For like most of the episode
But for any language that I understand well I only turn them on when the accent is so thick I can't get what the actors are saying.
Similarly I always turn on all subtitles in video games because it's easy to miss something if say ingame explosion or other sound effect covers the voice, or it is just too silent (say NPC talking that's a bit far)
But the article claim it helps multitasking seems weird - how having to look at screen would help when multitasking?
You have the audio on and are doing something else with your eyes. You don't quite hear something that's been said, glance at the screen, read the captions to fill in what was missed, return your eyes to your other task.
If it was audio only, you missed whatever it was, and have to live with it or replay a little bit of content. Going back a few seconds is often a UI challenge not worth the gained context, IMHO, but if it happens a lot, might as well not be watching anything.
never watched anything in a foreign language? It's just familiarity, after a while you get used to reading and watching at the same time.
I'm from Europe so used to subtitles from early age. My wife is Canadian, and first little while of our dating was bewildered with subtitles.
Now though, literally all my Canadian in-laws use subtitles, intergenerationalLy - they're used to them, and addicted to knowing what the heck is going on :)
My 26 year-old son watches everything with captions, so there’s always a battle because I switch them off and he switches them back on again.
This is a skill. I would have agreed with you 20 years ago but at some point I started putting them on because I could only afford a shitty audio setup and dramas got really mumbly. Took a while, but I learned to not be distracted by the subtitles.
Ditto with excessive darkness.
Bonus if it’s delayed by exactly 2 seconds, so that it doesn’t spoil jokes, and I can quickly reference it if I missed something someone said (helping me avoid fixating on the captions.)
Because it’s the CC descriptions of music swells and things like “[laughs] and “[crying]”, etc that are distracting for me, and not needed.
What’s worse, sometimes they ruin comedic timing by putting the punchline on the screen before the setup has finished (or logical equivalent of a punchline… comedy is often found in timing) and the captions ruin the timing.
Agreed on timing issues. This also seems to vary by show/producer.
As a non-native English speaker I’m used to watching most television and movies with subtitles. The extra sound descriptions don’t bother me too much actually. Sometimes it is kind of funny actually, it is a running joke in my home to count the times a show has [ominous music].
This is the exact reason why I vastly prefer playing media on my own media player. I have it set to always delay subtitles by exactly 2 seconds. I even have the font overridden to use a nice geometric sans (Josefin Sans, to be exact); subtitles with bitmap fonts (like they are on DVD and Blu-ray) are disabled outright.
Every time there's a new person watching something with me, they comment on the subtitle delay. It usually starts with a complaint that the subs are off-sync. Never had someone (yet) stick to that complaint though, after this explanation. But, nobody I've met has previously recognised a need for such a delay, either. Until they watch something with me, of course.
I think that'd ruin me more than not having subtitles at all, because I just get stuck at reading the subtitles all the time if they are on (which, I have on 99% of the time). I go so far to avoid content that doesn't have subtitles.
What I'd love to have, would be a "speed-reading" version of subtitles, that just show each word individually as it's spoken (or maybe two/three) instead of the full sentence. That way it can still be in sync, while not ruining punchlines. Would be a real hassle to actually write/make the subtitles though, but with all the AI/ML around today, there is probably a way to automate it.
I don't know if they've ever considered having that as a display option. They're just one of the only companies I can think of for whom it wouldn't involve a whole rethinking of how they create the captions.
This drives me nuts too, especially when they're being subjective and I'm asking myself things like 'Was that music really "ominous"? Didn't seem that way...'
Another thing that bugs me is when captions reveal a character's name to indicate who is speaking when the name of that character hasn't actually been revealed in the story yet.
[0] https://mediawiki.middlebury.edu/MIDDMedia/Hot_versus_cool_m...
But I definitely agree that there is something to it, and video games occupy a different niche of entertainment than movies for me. Video games are a pastime and a hobby, movies and shows are not unlike books: I don't want to miss a single piece of the action.
When I have dinner I watch something off Youtube. Movie time is after dinner when I can give my full attention to it.
I really like to think of media consumption in terms of attentional pressure. How long can you not pay attention without "missing something". For movies and TV shows it seems like 15 seconds, plus or minus depending on the content itself. Chatty podcasts give you 30 seconds or a minute.
I enjoy the fast video games I play (shoutout to Deep Rock Galactic, killer PVE FPS with a non-toxic player base!) because they modulate their attentional pressure and ratchet it up intensely at moments. It feels great to handle a situation where even a subsecond lapse in attention would result in failure.
From wikipedia: Cool media are those that require high participation from users, due to their low definition (the receiver/user must fill in missing information). Since many senses may be used, they foster involvement. Conversely, hot media are low in audience participation due to their high resolution or definition.
Seems like it's hard to place fast video games? You don't have to fill in much of anything (hot) but they require full participation (cool).
If I'm actually fully immersed in the movie or whatever, and I can understand the dialogue, then I don't need the captions and I leave them off.
The alternative is that the new generation has no ability to focus on anything and needs the same information piped to their brain through both their eyes and ears. Up next: smellovision captions.
You may notice that in movie theaters—the most focused and immersive watching experience there is—they don’t show captions except maybe when translating foreign language.
Or you may not, if you only watch movies at home on your TV.
If there is bullshit framing then it is the very notion of assumptions based on age, which is caked into the headline.
Movies originally had captions, because there was no dialogue track. As soon as they figured out synchronized sound, the captions went away. Even if people were paying very close attention.
Movie theaters have the same influence on a mind as any other experience of collective attention. It keeps your attention aligned with attention of a crowd. It may be a case of herd behavior, or it may be something special, I dont know, but it works.
I believe that this collective attention is the main reason why movie threaters are still profitable. But not just it: surroundings associated with attention on a screen and all these rituals, like eating pop corn, also do their part as stimuli leading to a learned response. You get highly focused attention without any conscious effort. You need conscious to fight it and to divert attention from a screen.
But it doesn't matter when you try to watch a movie or a lecture at home. Despite of all your experience of collective attention it would be much harder to keep your attention focused.
Even some DVDs did not have the option to turn off subtitles. I never had subtitles on for anything that gave me the option. (I even bought DVDs from overseas occasionally to not get subtitles)
But now every other show is frequently incomprehensible.
Either they've put lead in the drinking water, making us all not understand the spoken word, or they've made dialog audio shit.
Well, it just tells you come from the English speaking country. For the rest of us, subtitles in a movie theatre are among most normal things in the world.
Older people are more likely to be alone and the TV helps to break the silence. TV is usually tv shows where people speak properly so that helps i guess
In the past, that line needed to come in loud and clear, or people would just miss it, probably forever. Now, we can rewind, or of course turn on subtitles, so there's not as much pressure on the audio finishing to be super clear.
By contrast I always pay attention when CC is off.
Given how much younger people use their my phone, I’m gonna say my hypothesis is plausible.
Also, for those who think viewers are morally obligated to watch ads, my experience has been that if I don't click the "Skip Ad" button, I will keep getting more ads and never get to the feature!
It's because people are listening to shows through terrible audio setups by default
I have zero problem at movies. But I always watch TV with subcaptions. There’s usually some words that I miss
There's supposed to be sound engineers on every show/movie to make sure it sounds good but the gap lies between your audio system and the reference systems they use. A good analogy is the infamous Game of Thrones battle that was too dark. They edited that episode on reference grade monitors where you could see what was happening, but the average lower end tv and viewing environment couldn't translate the same black levels and details that the editor's had seen when they worked those scenes (they were also intemtionally edited to look dark and chaotic on the reference grade monitors*, which added to the problem)
That being said I still use cc with a lot of content. I think it would be less prevalent though if it were not for the gaping holes in most audio setups.
Through my years of watching Anime it's also quite easy for me to watch and read at the same time.
I think for watching movies they can be useful too, because it feels like almost every movie coming out now has terrible audio mixing for the average person. Even the audio mixing in a Dolby Atmos theatre doesn't seem right. If you watch any modern film mastered in Dobly Atmos on a TV with a sound bar you will have a bad time. You'll have a worse time if you're watching with just the TV speakers.