Turning Hobbies into Content — Goodreads and Letterboxd
Are these platforms changing how we engage with media, and especially our relationship to it?
I want to start off by saying that I think we can all agree that tracking the books we read and the movies we watch is entertaining, especially if we are someone who enjoys watching a lot of films or reading a lot of books. I know I enjoy recording all the movies or books I’ve seen or read throughout the year, it becomes a fun reflection of what I’ve engaged with throughout the years.
There is nothing inherently wrong with this style of recording, many people do it, the dangers seem to come from our engagement with these websites and whether we’re changing our media habits to accommodate these platforms and their algorithms.
I saw a TikTok recently (although for the life of me I can’t find it again) where a girl admitted to continuously watching films she didn’t want to continue watching or felt actively traumatized by the process of finishing a film — just so she could log the movie onto Letterboxd. I have seen similar happen with Goodreads as well.
I have also had it happen to me where I feel the need to finish books that I actively dislike just because I started them and now feel the need to finish them so I can record them as read and have them contribute to my yearly reading challenge. I have also artificially selected books that are shorter, either poetry, manga or graphic novels, that I can consume in a day to raise the number of books contributing to the same challenge.
So, the danger of these sites isn’t inherently their structure — I personally think the memes and reviews that come out of Letterboxd and Goodreads are entertaining and add a lot to our discussion of these mediums — however, a danger does arise in how these platforms can influence how we engage with media, seemingly forcing us to consume film and literature we dislike in order to increase our record.
This is an issue I feel more with Goodreads than Letterboxd. While Letterboxd definitely encourages watching a film all the way through, there is no system to update Letterboxd as to how far you’ve progressed through the film, as with Goodreads and their progression meter with books. While much of this is due to how books and films are consumed, books are are longer commitments than films that are often consumed in a single sitting, the Goodreads reading challenge setting also encourages this almost rabid consumption of literature.
I can hear someone argue in response: “Well, what is wrong with encouraging the reading the books?” And my answer is nothing, but what is wrong is this development of media and culture engagement becoming something else that has become content itself. We read these books so that at the end of the year we can see our year in review on Goodreads and brag to our friends about our reading average, and the trend on Letterboxd has become (in some instances) to brag about all your films or artificially inflate your movie watching, as is suspected of this one Letterboxd user.
Much like the Spotify year in review (which admittedly I really enjoy seeing), this has just turned activities that have traditionally been seen as relaxing or unproductive into products, into content that can be consumed and shared. Books and films are consumed, rather than enjoyed, and have been turned into content that is engaged with on many different terms than these mediums were intended to be engaged with.
While not a widespread phenomenon, I think this trend is a concerning one, or at least one that should be engaged with critically. We should be resistant to the idea that once ‘unproductive’ hobbies are becoming products themselves for social media platforms and algorithms, especially when it begins to influence and shift our own behaviour.
