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.
#CLOSED CAPTIONING ON TIKTOK MOVIE#
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.
A 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.
0 kommentar(er)
