Why do all these 20-somethings have closed captions turned on?

And the volume levels vary so much. If you don’t want hearing loss or angry housemates you turn it down and then can’t hear the normal dialog. If I am watching very closely I will incessantly fiddle with the volume, but otherwise then captions are nice. I agree tho I miss visual side of the film while reading the captions. But I also tend to watch stuff I really like more than once so I get the body language second run thru.

The article cites

> In a May survey of about 1,200 Americans, 70% of adult Gen Z respondents (ages 18 to 25) and 53% of millennial respondents (up to age 41) said they watch content with text most of the time. That’s compared with slightly more than a third of older respondents, according to the report commissioned by language-teaching app Preply.

Not sure if you want to trust Preply over your clickbait spidey sense. I’ve never heard of them. But FYI.

Not being 20-something, I can't speak for them, but for me:

A lot of dialog is mixed way down in relation to the music and background noise, actors tend to speed up and drop the volume at the ends of their sentences, and of course there are those pesky accents.

I'm seeing a lot of other good reasons in this thread, too.

I just want to leave a comment to the people who said they turn it on for movies because they can't hear the audio over other movie sounds.

If you can't hear the audio clearly the director didn't want to you to hear the audio correctly. Some scenes especially with thick accents the point is to be ambiguous, you having captions on is basically a cheat code to get more context than the director wanted you to have.

Same goes for when someone speaks a foreign language, if the CC is not baked into the video layer I assume the director wanted me to be in the shoes of someone who cant understand a conversion and guess the characters intent.

It's like reading a novel with pictures on every page, you don't need that much context, it robs your brains ability to infer with missing context.

I started using subtitles to watch movies with my wife, who used to have trouble understanding American English. I’ve become so used to them that I use them on my own now.

Could be a combination of:

- Degraded hearing

- Degraded audio comprehension, relying on the text

- Realising how much I was missing, just due to bad audio mixing or low quality TV speakers

- Getting over the ‘annoyance’ of having text pop up on screen & being able to view both the subject & text at once.

I watched Top Gun (new) with my dad, he has a sound-bar setup and a HUGE TV. I honestly couldn’t understand 50% of the dialogue, and when I asked him to enable the subtitles he refused and said I should get my hearing checked. So I started asking him “what did they say?”, and to his surprise, half the time he couldn’t actually tell me what the actors were saying. It’s a mix of issues. I think that movie had horrible audio mastering and maybe a lot of media does these days too.