LA Times and Entertainment Weekly wrote articles about the “reality” show, “My Deaf Family” and explains how Marlee Matlin being very persistent to promote this show via YouTube. It is probably the very first professional television series to be shown on the Internet with captions! YouTube/Google uses their automated captions and that has 50 different languages! It is a true accessibility for everyone in the world to view this show.

To read these fascinating articles, click here for LA Times.

Click here for Entertainment Weekly.

Oh, the irony! This show is about Deaf family. How come no one at entertainment industry listen to us? They are too worried about how to ‘pull’ this show off or how… which means they think this show may not be profitable for them.

According to this article, it explains the reason further,

“But they still hesitated because they had no idea how an audience would react to characters signing with voice-overs and occasional subtitles. Anyone who watches reality television will tell you that they employ subtitles a lot for dialogue that’s difficult to catch on the fly. But I wouldn’t give up.”

That is the most absurd excuse I’ve ever heard. Look at the top-grossing movie, Avatar. It comes with captions for some dialogues spoken in Nani language. Look at another famous movies, “Dancing with the Wolves”, “The Passion” and few other examples, they include subtitles for foreign language spoken on the screen. It is not DIFFICULT to catch on the fly! Geez!

After 30 years of closed captioning, and more and more people are using captions to watch their TV shows, and how this can be a problem? Geez!

That does not make any sense to me. I think it is all about phonocentrism (the value of sounds and spoken words) and prejudice against sign languages and subtitles on the screen.

More information on phonocentrism, here’s the description that I found from Wikipedia.

Phonocentrism is the idea that sounds and speech are inherently superior (or “more natural”) to the written language. To adherents of this philosophy, spoken language is inherently richer and more intuitive than written language. Phonocentrism holds that spoken language is the primary, fundamental way of communicating, and writing is merely a “second-rate” attempt to capture speech.

Did people ever realize that it was Thomas Alva Edison who was partially Deaf, invented the first movie projector in 1888 called Kinetoscope? Then few years later in 1893, Edison invented Kinetograph, to add sounds to the moving pictures.

That’s phonocentrism. Plain and simple.

Go to YouTube and watch Matlin’s ‘My Deaf Family” and tell the world that we need a wide variety of shows, captions, voice-over and sign language included!

Best,
Amy Cohen Efron