As of June 2024, Letterboxd, a site for film fans to log and review their watching has 14 million users. Goodreads, its counterpart for books, has 150 million. Now, don’t get me wrong, I can see the appeal: the sense of achievement, the rush of dopamine every time you log something with a witty "if you know you know" review for other users. In fact, I’m jealous of those who can look back at every piece of art they’ve consumed and loved over the last few years (although if you’re a Goodreads fan, please check out Storygraph, which is owned by a black woman, Nadia Odunayo, and not Jeff Bezos!). To me, however, there’s darker side to this compulsion to turn artistic enjoyment into data and content.
While gamifying cultural consumption may encourage us to allocate more time for art, if you’re holding yourself to a strict goal, you are equally inviting unnecessary shame and self-reproach into your life – like the time I pledged to the Amazon gods and all my followers that I’d read 30 books in a year and then it took me 6 months to reread The Hunger Games.
We have this mentality that metrics are more accurate or more insightful than other ways of learning about ourselves
In fact, I object in general to my enjoyment of art being turned into numbers. I want to listen to the Glee Cast without fear of them taking up a thousand minutes of my Spotify wrapped. Far too much of my life is consumed by apps on my phone only to be regurgitated to me in another even more horrifying statistic - screen time. Professor Deborah Lupton, Author of The Quantified Self, which explores in detail our obsession with self-tracking, states “we have this mentality that metrics are more accurate or more insightful than other ways of learning about ourselves,” and we’re losing the ability to let art shape our perspective naturally. The phenomenon equally turns us all immediately into critics, reducing our instinct to recognise the inherent value in art.
In fact, we’ve seen the phenomenon of self-tracking taken to extremes in other areas, specifically health. It’s true, a part of me does wish I’d taken up running five years ago so I could be a full time Strava mule now, but this extreme culture of presenting an ideal version of our habits is deeply unnerving. Now, to call myself a film fan, I must represent myself in just four films that are critically well-received, cult classics, and at once relatable yet unique to my own personality. Every aspect of cultural consumption becomes an online performance of self, fuelled by capitalist incentives and thus completely alienating.
I may have a long way to go to convince the millions of users that enjoy self-tracking. But consider this a call to arms to celebrate hobbies that are done averagely, and without ulterior motives of creating a self-representational aesthetic. In other words, run slowly, read infrequently, watch bad movies and listen to cringe albums and let’s radically reclaim some simple pleasures.
