Drew Austin on the increasingly common practice of watching movies and TV with subtitles switched on.
“Show, don’t tell” is age-old writing advice, but the way we consume entertainment today suggests that we want to be told as well as shown. Transcriptions of dialogue in video content—subtitles and closed captioning—have always been essential for viewers with hearing loss. But they’ve gained broader popularity more recently, as a growing number of viewers use them to better understand that dialogue, or to simply follow along in an era when TV is increasingly ambient, and one of many content streams we consume simultaneously.
Last year, Netflix revealed that 40 percent of its global users always turn subtitles on, while 80 percent do so at least once a month. A separate survey found that subtitle usage is inversely correlated with age, and it’s not the demographic you might expect: 70 percent of Gen Z respondents and 53 percent of millennials said they watch TV with text transcriptions on most of the time.
There are plenty of obvious reasons for a viewer without hearing loss to use subtitles: foreign language dialogue, difficult-to-understand accents, the need to watch quietly at home (or in public, which the majority of survey respondents reported doing). Captions also make TV screenshots more memeable.
Counterintuitively, TV has also become less audible, partially as a result of technological advances.
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