An influence of Subtitle on Viewer's Variety Program Interpretation

How does the subtitle of recently-increasing TV variety shows affect the show interpretation of users? What does such the phenomenon mean? Marshall Mcluhan defined that TV was 'the cool media' because it led the user's participation by utilization of many senses. If the show is focused only on a visual stimuli by taking away a chance to listen by unnecessary subtitle or taking very sensational scenes, the show will depend on only one sense unlike the meaning defined by Marshall Mcluhan and will be progressed to 'the hot media' of suppressing other senses. Accordingly, this study is intended to examine it through comparing and analyzing the TV variety shows of Korea, USA and Japan. By classifying the subtitle used for the program by type and analyzing how much it subjectively 8 intervene in the users' interpretation by frequency, the results are derived. Because the third party conversation subtitle which has been sharply increased in the Korean variety shows directly delivers the subjective opinions to the viewers by writer or PD, the show prevents the users from thinking by themselves and leads them to the producer's intention. As the result of comparing and analyzing the frequency, it can be known that the variety show of USA has mainly used the objective situation subtitle not the subjective third party conversation subtitle. But, the variety shows of Korea and Japan show the subjective subtitle a lot in almost all scenes. So, they take out the chance to listen. Barthes pointed out that the things most common to us are actually the cultural products, and this is the result of a conceptual framework being too familiar and overlooked. This is to clarify how the denotative meaning of each situation has been delicately implemented up to now by searching overlooked situations in a daily life. Barthes categorizes the message given by advertisement as 1) the linguistic message, 2) the connotational message and 3) the denotational message. From the three messages mentioned above, viewers will usually want to verify the language message. The subtitles of variety programs - these are called anchors - provides important information of the program being shown, thus the anchors of the meaning. Such the result says that the variety show of Korea has been controlled by one visual sense. Because it is difficult for the public to distinguish the manipulated image and the fact, they don't see a source of causal relationship in a fantasy, truth & manipulation, and causal relationship and they try to judge by superficial approach and similar experience. So, because they are likely to get into a confusion and error, they must take precautions against the visual which depends on one sense.