Closed captioners, please include tempo in your captions.
Your service is helpful and necessary, so, thank you! But captions are capable of more.
If at its deepest communication is the expression of ideas, then the semantic units pieced together to express those ideas are important. Yes, those units can be words and pauses like a period, but aren’t there other rhythms of life?
We feel the rhythms of our mother’s heart, drumming inside our own, before we even breathe air. We speak and write with pause and punctuation and inflection. Sign language, braille—think of a communication that doesn’t use tempo.
So, can our captions better capture all of this? Shouldn’t they?