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

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

#181

Post by happytoexplain »

At first I assumed this was just going to be the writer being out of touch. Of course young people use subtitles. They're distracting and frequently ugly, but modern movies/shows have awful audio mixing, forcing you to turn it down, and mumbling/whispering dialogue. And we frequently watch things in environments where we don't want sound or headphones, e.g. TikTok or whatever in public or at night (and also, since these platforms start playback automatically, you'd otherwise miss something). And of course, we watch things that aren't in English.

But then I read all the accounts of people who can't explain why they turn on subtitles, aside from "I just like it" or "I'm just used to it", and I just... I feel confused, angry. I AM the out of touch old person.

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

#183

Post by Tao3300 »

joshstrange wrote: post #70

31 but yeah, I've had subs on for almost a decade now? Maybe only 6-7 years? For me I find I miss things without the subs on. Whispered/background dialog that I'm unsure how anyone is supposed to hear/understand being top of list but also sound mixing seems to be terrible by default and it's hard to hear/understand characters even in a quiet room sometimes. I read quickly so subs have never been an issue to me, I can…

Beginning to push 40 and I remember when this was observed about us. My spouse and I have been doing this for about 10 yrs.

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

#184

Post by NikolaNovak »

bscphil wrote: post #83
perrygeo wrote: post #45

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 entertain…

> [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 a…

It's really very fast to get used to if you try.

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 :)

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

#185

Post by Klonoar »

ryandrake wrote: post #136

One more vote for terrible audio mixes and one for actors who mumble their dialog. Whenever I watch movies with my wife, we constantly have to fiddle with the remote control. The loud parts (including explosions and music) are too loud for her, so we have to turn the volume down during those parts, but the dialog is too quiet and mumbly for me to hear, so we turn the volume up during those parts. We now just keep the…

There's an article that's been floating around that notes this phenomenon started after Nolan's movies became the style to emulate, and there are various sound engineers who state they would like to do what you want but they have to produce what the paying entity asks for. Someone should feel free to link it here - I'm mobile at the moment so can't dig it up.

But anyway, I just wanted to jump in and say... all the time on this site we see programmers complaining about management/etc forcing things to happen that you don't want happening. Sound engineers may be in a similar boat here. ;P

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

#186

Post by jimbob45 »

As a closed caption user, I partially use it to try and improve my vocabulary. On the fly, it’s very easy to hear a word like “hoi polloi” and not know how to spell it. In that case, that’s a missed learning opportunity.

Also, closed captions make watching TV on mute seamless and that’s fantastic if you like to intersperse your viewing with conversation.

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

#187

Post by thrown_22 »

perrygeo wrote: post #45

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 entertain…

>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.

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

#188

Post by stubish »

AlbertCory wrote: post #115

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.

One cause of this is sending 5.1 audio through two speakers, where the center channel just gets dropped along with a lot of dialog. Another cause is of course crappy mixing.

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

#189

Post by plushpuffin »

silisili wrote: post #88
smeej wrote: post #73

The article mentions but doesn't get into the "audio description" option too. If you haven't ever tried this, it takes a little getting used to, but once you do, it makes multitasking much easier. I strongly recommend giving it a try. During the gaps in speech, a narrator comes on and describes the most important things happening on the screen. I had a gig for awhile actually writing the descriptions for this content…

I watched Super 8, on I think Amazon, when it came out. I thought it was about the weirdest movie I'd ever seen, a narrated in real time action movie. Come to find out, for whatever reason, it had audio description turned on by default. As someone who can see and hear fine, I found it rather odd(before learning what it was). But for a vision impaired person, such a thing must be a game changer.

I had the opposite experience watching a vampire film called 30 Days of Night! For whatever reason my DVD player didn’t show any subtitles, even the translation from the Aramaic spoken by the vampires. So, I got to watch a bunch of undead growl unintelligibly at each other throughout the movie. It actually improved the experience because not knowing what they were saying made it so much creeper!

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

#190

Post by Somatochlora »

zach_garwood wrote: post #74

I like having CCs on for movies because the dialog is always so quiet compared to the music and sound effects. I can keep it at a reasonable volume and still catch what the characters are saying. Also, if I'm watching British shows, I like CCs because I'm really bad at accents. Edit: I'm coming up on 40 now, so I guess I'm not the people this article is complaining about.

I don't understand how the people making movies/TV still haven't figured this out. Do they all just have home theaters and never try to watch something on a phone with crappy audio or when somebody is sleeping in the house?
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