McKay sees text as serving several functions, such as helping fans appreciate the “little innuendos” she slips into her lyrics and serving as a sort of teaser for new viewers. Only the auto-generated ones fit that bill those that creators write themselves are open captions.) Some of her posts don’t include any speaking at all. (Closed captions are those that can be turned on and off.
More traditional influencer post types - an outfit montage a reaction video - come with subtitles of their own, sometimes hand-typed and other times auto-generated. It's not just a strategy she uses for her music videos either. When TikTok launched the auto-captioning tool, she quickly latched on to it. McKay said she began writing captions for her TikToks last summer, around the same time she started to think about her presence on the platform as an actual career.
Soon after TikTok launched its auto-captioning tool, Instagram released one of its own.Īnd the trend isn't confined to social media: Watching television with subtitles appears to be increasingly commonplace, for reasons as varied as sleeping housemates, ambient background noise, dialogue-muffling sound mixes and the wider range of accents in mainstream entertainment.īut on TikTok, a mix of factors - including the incentive structures that motivate influencers to produce certain types of content, widespread shifts in how people consume online media and the successful advocacy of disability rights groups - have all come together to make subtitles and captions a particularly prominent feature of the most downloaded app in the world last year. YouTube launched automatic captioning in 2009 the thin black strip of text that Snapchat lets users paste over their photos and videos is perhaps the most recognizable of the app's ever-increasing list of features. TikTok isn't the first social network to overlay words on videos. "It is part of a general trend to more fully represent reality," Hilbert said, citing an academic framework called media richness theory. And the Gen Z-ers who make up TikTok's main demographic grew up on an internet rich with video and audio, where reading was strictly optional.Īlthough there's a drift in digital technologies away from text and toward "a more multimedial representation of reality," UC Davis communications professor Martin Hilbert said, TikTok subtitles complement rather than replace the app's core video elements.
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After all, subtitles are a notoriously big obstacle for American movie audiences, who rate foreign-language films the lowest of all film genres. The platform's closed captioning hashtag, #cc, sits at more than 4 billion views. Users can write their own - in a number of eye-catching fonts and colors - or, as of April, let TikTok auto-generate them. Open the app and you’ll see them everywhere: overlaid atop memes, embedded in stand-up comedy clips, flashing by in movie trailers. “It captures the attention of people, and they’re able to actually process what’s going on.”Ī video app known primarily as a place to watch dances and lip-syncs set to popular songs, TikTok has emerged as an unlikely forum for text in the form of its increasingly ubiquitous captions. “Our attention spans are so short now that I feel like closed captioning, and putting the captions up on the screen if closed captioning isn’t an option, is so crucial,” said McKay, 21, who lives in Portland, Ore.
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