Hello friends!
It came to me unexpectedly. After watching this video I realized that I'd gotten used to seeing subtitles, and my brain wants to see them.
Either I turned them on at some point, and then youtube remembered my choice, or they just activated them by default. But most of the videos I've watched over the last few weeks had subtitles ON.
To be honest, I do enjoy having subtitles. Especially, for an ESL person, sometimes I don't understand/hear every single word. The person can be talking quietly, or they may have an accent that's hard for me to decode ๐ Hello, Scotland, Ireland, Australia, and a handful of other variations. Subtitles help. Even when there is no problem with comprehension. And here I have a problem.
I noticed that I had been using subtitles even without a real necessity. The issue is - I tend to stick to the words on the screen, instead of absorbing the visual cues of the actors, scanning through the scene details, etc. Reading subtitles causes me to miss the maximum potential experience of a video.
Thinking a bit deeper, I have started noticing how my "speech decoding" mechanism started to weaken. My eyes are expecting to have the reading option because it's easier for the brain. As we know our brains are extremely lazy and they gravitate towards saving energy ๐ฆฅ So, my concern is that if I keep reading subtitles, my audio parsing ability will atrophy. Can you imagine - speaking with a person on a street while your brain demands to see subtitles (hello, AR glasses ๐)
Knowing what I know about evolution and how our brains and bodies evolve, I am pretty certain that the constant use of subtitles will degrade our speech recognition skills.
Am I overthinking this? ๐ง ๐คฃ
Have your usage of subtitles increased in the last months?
๐ My content
Published the first podcast of 2023: Hustling, Resume Advice, and UX Bootcamps with Brad Clark, the Director of Talent Acquisition at Article.
Brad shares his career journey and entrepreneurial endeavours. We discuss the biggest challenges in the recruitment industry, how companies should look at the employment gaps, the t-shirt sizing secret to filling jobs, resume tips, using hustle to stand out from others, interesting thoughts on UX bootcamps, and much more.
Listen/watch here: Youtube, Spotify, Apple.
โค๏ธ My favourite things
๐ Movie: Ex Machina - pretty old, but more and more relevant with all the ChatGPT hype and what potential future awaits us. IMDB.
๐ Cool finds
Substitute Teacher - Key & Peele (youtube.com) โ Hilarious ๐. What made this even funnier, was that my previous manager's name was Aaron. He didn't seem to find this as funny, as we did ๐
Accessibility for hashtags (accessible-social.com) โ this is an easy change in your social media posts, but a huge difference for people who have to use screen readers. No excuse to not do this. I wonder why social media platforms that use suggested hashtags feature, can't use CamelCase capitalization for these suggestions. Such a miss.
Earth's Surface infographic (twitter.com) โ I like when an illustration educates in a way that provokes curiosity and makes me want to analyze and compare different bits.
Google Calendar, but it shows the cost of the meeting (twitter.com) โ I've brought this up many times at work, but having this kind of feature would be amazing to re-think all these recurring meetings. Though it requires a very transparent culture - being open about what each employee makes is extraordinary ๐
Why are so many tech companies laying people off right now? (theverge.com) โ Are investors to blame? ๐ค
Technology over the long run: zoom out to see how dramatically the world can change within a lifetime (ourworldindata.org) โ a lovely and insightful infographic about different technologies and the timeline.
Ciao! ๐ค