> They’re now a must-have for plenty of people without hearing loss, too, helping them better understand the audio or allowing them to multitask.
Aha! I have some answers here. Kind of, anyway.
This is something that people older than 20-something do, too, and have done their whole lives.
They're likely to do it if they grew up with the following often being true:
1) The TV is on.
2) At least some people are actually trying to watch it (it's not just "background noise")
3) The living space is fairly compact, such that if people are making noise in common areas there are no other common areas to escape to (not with a TV, anyway).
4) Bedrooms maybe don't have a TV or they aren't equipped with the same stuff as the "good" (living room, probably) TV.
5) House chaotic, lots of people around doing various things, many of these people (adults and kids alike) talking much louder than what some of us may be used to.
6) TV often in use in this same way during large gatherings (family and friends over, holidays, whatever)
In other words—drum roll—a Fussellian "Prole" (lower class) house.
But, why is this showing up in stats now? I suspect two causes:
1) "Prole" kids growing up and getting more streaming services than their parents had, plus using them more.
2) Anime has gone very, very mainstream among "the youths", so (as some others have noted) this may be expanding the set of people for whom captions seem normal beyond the ones I'm otherwise describing here.
Source: I know people for whom having the captioning on was normal when they were growing up, and they still do it because it's what they're used to, and I was in their houses when we were kids and saw why they gained that habit/preference. They're older than their 20s.
[EDIT] Others mentioned modern video sources coming with audio mixes that suck ass on most home entertainment systems—just flat-out incompatible with the reality of how most people watch TV/movies, where they want the highs (KABOOM! BLAM, BLAM!) to be much lower than the highs in a modern movie theater, plus are very likely watching on a crappy "sound bar", if not built-in stereo speakers. That could be a 3) on my list of causes, with 2 and 3 both being things other than the main phenomenon I'm describing int he rest of the post. This one would basically be the fault of movie and TV productions themselves, who aren't serving most home viewers well with the audio mixes they're providing.
Aha! I have some answers here. Kind of, anyway.
This is something that people older than 20-something do, too, and have done their whole lives.
They're likely to do it if they grew up with the following often being true:
1) The TV is on.
2) At least some people are actually trying to watch it (it's not just "background noise")
3) The living space is fairly compact, such that if people are making noise in common areas there are no other common areas to escape to (not with a TV, anyway).
4) Bedrooms maybe don't have a TV or they aren't equipped with the same stuff as the "good" (living room, probably) TV.
5) House chaotic, lots of people around doing various things, many of these people (adults and kids alike) talking much louder than what some of us may be used to.
6) TV often in use in this same way during large gatherings (family and friends over, holidays, whatever)
In other words—drum roll—a Fussellian "Prole" (lower class) house.
But, why is this showing up in stats now? I suspect two causes:
1) "Prole" kids growing up and getting more streaming services than their parents had, plus using them more.
2) Anime has gone very, very mainstream among "the youths", so (as some others have noted) this may be expanding the set of people for whom captions seem normal beyond the ones I'm otherwise describing here.
Source: I know people for whom having the captioning on was normal when they were growing up, and they still do it because it's what they're used to, and I was in their houses when we were kids and saw why they gained that habit/preference. They're older than their 20s.
[EDIT] Others mentioned modern video sources coming with audio mixes that suck ass on most home entertainment systems—just flat-out incompatible with the reality of how most people watch TV/movies, where they want the highs (KABOOM! BLAM, BLAM!) to be much lower than the highs in a modern movie theater, plus are very likely watching on a crappy "sound bar", if not built-in stereo speakers. That could be a 3) on my list of causes, with 2 and 3 both being things other than the main phenomenon I'm describing int he rest of the post. This one would basically be the fault of movie and TV productions themselves, who aren't serving most home viewers well with the audio mixes they're providing.