Mollie Goodfellow, a writer and social media creative, believes keeping the subs on is “definitely easier than doing captioning yourself”.
Netflix’s official Twitter account for its show Sex Education is called “no context sex education” and just features grabs from the show. And, of course, there are those No Context accounts that even programme-makers have dabbled in. Deep within this feedback loop is a meme culture that means, if you’re quick enough to put a funny screengrab online complete with caption, you could be looking at likes and retweets well into five figures. Take Love Island, which spawns a new glut of Instagram influencers every series. Increasingly, social media is the lens through which people watch TV – and TV then pushes them back to social media.
This sense of grabbing audiences’ attention through text rather than visuals led New York Times writer Amanda Hess to point out that “viral video-makers are reanimating some of the same techniques that ruled silent film over 100 years ago”. “From an industry perspective, we’re always looking for the ‘thumb-stoppers’ – bits of short video that will make people stop what they’re doing and watch until the end.” Up to 85% of Facebook videos, she adds, are watched without sound – and thus with subtitles.Ī throwback to the silent era … Parks and Recreation. “There’s nothing worse than sitting somewhere quiet, only for some viral content your mum’s put on Facebook to start blaring out at you,” she says, adding that subtitles can hook in casual viewers. That figure may be 13 years old, but the regulator says: “Our understanding is that subtitle use has increased as the use of smart/mobile devices has increased, as more and more people watch programmes or videos on commutes.”Ĭhristina McDermott, a social media manager, explains the shift in more detail. Besides, with TV shows often plagued with claims of unintelligible ambient sound (Shane Meadows’ The Virtues being the latest), it’s little wonder that subtitles seem to be all around.Ī startling Ofcom study from 2006 estimated that, of the 7.5 million UK TV viewers using subtitles, only 1.5 million had a hearing impairment. Joy of text … The Good Place with subtitles.Īmong the many replies DG received were lots of teenagers and people in their early 20s who said they liked using subtitles because it allowed them to multitask.
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