At home, we watch the TV with subtitles. Mainly because of impaired hearing, as you might expect. But I can recommend it to the uninitiated - partly for the not-so-occasional mishaps that can be vastly more entertaining / enlightening / truthful than the spoken word… (must say tho that the quality and coverage of subtitling in the UK is these days quite superb - keep up the good work). But i reckon the experience has other benefits, and suggests an interesting insight, as I’ll explain. Let me set the scene:

So my parents are staying with us at the moment. Which is nice. And last night we were having one of those quiet Royle Family-style evenings, just sitting around. There was my dad (in his mid-sixties) on the laptop (+ wifi broadband) checking his gmail account and writing a Powerpoint presentation for next weekend. Of course. And me, on the laptop, blogging, as you do. My wife, reading a magazine (she’d be online but the men had half-inched all the laptops…). And my mum - knitting…

And here’s the thing. In the background, the TV, subtitles on, muted - but still on. I know, I know - such a waste of (green) electricity. It suddenly felt to me that amidst the almost neo-edwardian quaintness of the scene the ‘tele’ had taken on a new role - one akin to the ambient / background character of radio, receiving just enough subconscious and/or occasional attention to be ‘there’, but no more.

But maybe this is not unique to those of us who know where the subtitle and mute buttons are on the remote. Is TV being relegated in this way in other people’s lives? Attention is a precious commodity, and maybe we’re just not willing to give as much of it to the box as we used to. Maybe people don’t “feel that television is important in their lives” to quite the same degree as various advertising / planning tomes have taught us over the years. TV’s not going away. But the way we use it is changing.

If we’re not even watching the programming properly, what hope has TV advertising got in this future?

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