The Rise of Subtitle Usage Among Young Adults
Taylor Heine, a 35-year-old from Johnson City, Tennessee, is a multitasker who often watches TV shows or movies while playing on her phone, loving her animals, or cleaning. To keep up with the dialogue, she turns on subtitles, allowing her to switch between tasks and catch up on any missed conversations. Heine’s fiancé also benefits from this setup, as it eliminates the need to blast the TV when he’s cooking or making noise in the kitchen.
A recent survey conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that people under 45 are more likely to use subtitles than older adults. Approximately 4 in 10 adults under 45 use subtitles at least “often” when watching TV or movies, compared to about 3 in 10 adults over 45. Those 60 and older are more likely to say they “never” use subtitles.
Why Young Adults Prefer Subtitles
According to the poll, many young adults use subtitles because they are watching in noisy environments or while multitasking. David Barber, a sound editor and mixer, and president of the Motion Picture Sound Editors, notes that this phenomenon is cultural. “What the younger kids are doing is, a lot of them will multitask. They’ll listen to music while they’re watching a show. So they’re catching bits and pieces of this, bits and pieces of that. I think they probably are half-listening and half-watching.”
Ariaunna Davis, 21, uses subtitles to catch every word, especially when watching in a noisy environment or trying to understand a character’s accent. Adrian Alaniz, 31, from Midland, Texas, uses subtitles to ensure he understands what’s being said, particularly when eating crunchy snacks or watching animated shows with dubbed audio.
Generation Gap and Subtitle Usage
The poll found that about 3 in 10 U.S. adults use subtitles because they are watching in a noisy environment, while roughly one-quarter say they do so due to poor audio quality. Sound designer Karol Urban notes that actors’ more internal and close style of emoting can make dialogue harder to hear, and the increased use of sound effects and music can also interfere with dialogue.
Patricia Gill, 67, from Columbus, Tennessee, doesn’t use closed captions but notices her grandson often has subtitles on his phone when watching movies. Gill prefers to rewind the show if she misses an important line, while her grandson likes to multitask and use subtitles to keep up with the dialogue.
The AP-NORC poll of 1,182 adults was conducted Aug. 21-25, using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel. The margin of sampling error for adults overall is plus or minus 3.8 percentage points. For more information on the survey, visit Here
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