When watching television—something I do with alarming regularity—I find myself using subtitles for everything (except comedy). Frankly, it's the only way I can follow the show's dialogue and discover which band recorded the soundtrack music.
Subtitles are useful tech.
Invented in 1972, subtitles (or closed captions) are used by about half of all TV viewers. And paradoxically, Gen Z (1990-2010) uses them the most. So, the reason for captions' popularity isn't simply muddy audio, age-related hearing loss, or inscrutable Scottish accents. It's that our brains have turned to stuffed-crust cheese mush.
Good tech supports scumbag brains.
Mark Zuckerberg's Meta recently spent $10 billion proving that virtual reality is virtually useless for normal human people. Yet, how useful would it be to have someone's name pop-up in your glasses when you run into them on the street? Or to price-check Air-Fryers right in the store? Or even just enlarge the type on a restaurant menu? Augmented reality would be amazing—like having subtitles IRL! Instead, the closest we come is $3,500 Apple Ski Goggles.
Back to the drawing board, tech-bros!
DISCLAIMER: I know that subtitles and captions are not the same. I have conflated the two above for SEO reasons only. Captions include background noises, atmospherics, speaker differentiation, and other information for individuals who're deaf or hard of hearing. Captions also come in two forms, open or closed. Closed captioning (CC) can be turned off by the viewer, while open (aka, “burned-in”) captions can't. Unlike captions, subtitles assume the viewers can hear, but don't speak the video's language. Subtitles are typically used when a film shot in one language is distributed to countries where the audience speaks a different language.
