What book tracking app are you using?

People were fine for thousands of years without movies, too. Without electricity. Without running water. We get new things to make our lives better and easier.

They have as much of it as you want, though. On second thought, maybe not as much as you want! Anyway, their point is they're for rating films/books and showing your ratings to others for comparison/recommendations, but many of them allow you to write somebody a message or comment on their rating, too.

It's all interconnected. How we consume art is connected to why we do it and what comes before it, which is how we find stuff. And after finding and seeing it, you save it somewhere. And then others see you watched something and maybe they did too and you can discuss it or maybe they haven't seen it and now you inspired them to watch it. It's a whole process.

I don't think this is the point I was making. But if you want to be cryptic about your "consumption", it's up to you.

Agreed. And then they make it public to share their love with others, in the hope they can inspire others and that others will do the same and inspire them.

Partially true. But all you need to receive is a high rating for a film from a person whose taste you respect. Then you watch the film. What more do you want? Maybe forums are more convenient for long-form conversations about films, but I saw quite a bit of comprehensive convos in the comments section of Letterboxd, so it's mostly just the preference of the medium.

If you broadcast it, your rating is visible publicly. And then people can get recommendations and see your taste and they can decide if you two have similar tastes. If you just catalog it in secret, you can only get back to check your own ratings, but nobody else can. Once again, this is good for porn if you're ashamed to share it with others but completely pointless if you have something as benign as movies or books. You should want to show everybody what you love in the hope of inspiring them to read/watch that stuff. And if you do it on a publicly available profile, thousands and thousands of people will see all your high ratings in one place!

I became a cinephile because I saw Werckmeister Harmonies as one guy's sole 10/10 on a Polish film-rating site. Just imagine this dude set his profile to private and I couldn't see his ratings. Maybe I wouldn't be a cinephile today!

__________________
Look, I'm not judging you - after all, I'm posting here myself, but maybe, just maybe, if you spent less time here and more time watching films, maybe, and I stress, maybe your taste would be of some value. Just a thought, ya know.

We live in a world where relentless marketing seeks to convince people they need more stuff than what they actually need. Just mentioning....

As Yoda suggests, I think you can enjoy art without tracking what you've read or showcasing your selections to others. I use Goodreads and I've honestly never considered posting a book for performative purposes on there. I don't know why someone would actually do that. The social capital you'd gain from doing that is pretty small, and I can only see that coming into play at all if done for the purpose of virtue signaling, and only if the book contained content that aligned with values that were popular at the time, which would be a pretty small subset of the books I read and record on goodreads.The reason that I use goodreads is, firstly, to track how many books I've read in a year, which as Yoda suggests, you can do on your own computer without sharing that information. Secondly, however, I do it so that I can use the algorithm to help me decide what other books to read. If I liked a book, and the algorithm suggests I might like other books in the same genre, or on the same topic, for example, then I will research those. I will see who wrote those other books, I'll read their synopses, I'll take a look at the overall rating of the book, I'll read some of the reviews from other readers on goodreads, etc. for help in determining if I'd learn something from reading those or might enjoy them. This is a value add that I wouldn't be able to benefit from if I didn't use the application. I also enjoy being notified when other friends of mine that use goodreads have read a book that I've read because that indicates that I either may have influenced them to read it by rating it well, or that these friends may be like minded and I may benefit from reading a book that they've read or recommended. I also enjoy the feature of goodreads that will show you, for the year, what your average star rating was for books you've read, because it helps me to determine if, on the whole, I'm choosing the right books to read. I do agree with Yoda that the primary purpose of these book tracking sites is not to engage in extended conversations about the book or to engage deeply with others that use the ap, but I do think there are benefits to using goodreads that may not be performative and that couldn't easily be gained if trying to track books on your own.

I'm a firm believer in NEVER listening to algorithm-recommended titles (for movies or books or anything else), in part because I like to constantly challenge myself with thing that would appear to fall outside my zone of comfort. Also, algorithms aren't yet good enough to even vaguely know what I would actually be interested in...

If other folks are comfortable with algo-rec's, well, enjoy staying in your comfort zone - but they're just not for me!

"Allow" is exactly the right word. You can do it, but it's clumsy, feature-poor, and they subtly discourage it in ways big and small. I use this example a lot, but notice the difference between old-school forums and social media. The text boxes on Facebook, for example, which technically can accommodate any length of response, are a single line by default. The text is small, too. Hitting enter submits the comment. Everything about the experience is designed to get you to post more often, not to say more in each response, and certainly not to think more about what you say.

That all the things we do and say (and don't) are interconnected is true. That you or anyone else can see how all those things interact in someone else's vast web of connections is usually not.

I don't know what your intent was, but you were suggesting that my disinterest in broadcasting what I read or watch was somehow hurting my appreciation of art, so I think it's a fair response to point out that people are far more likely to be distracted from genuine appreciation when they start attaching some kind of conspicuous social credit to artistic experiences. In video games they call this the extrinsic motivation problem: when you give someone a reason to do something other than the enjoyment of the thing itself, they start doing it for only that reason, and lose the joy of the actual experience. Which is how you get people going to grand museums or natural wonders and thinking more about how to stage a photo than about the things they see there.

I don't think it's cryptic; the alternative to "don't performatively broadcast your consumption" is not secrecy, it's just...not performatively broadcasting your consumption. It's talking about it when it's relevant or feeds into some meaningful interaction, but not bringing it up or putting it in front of people for its own sake.

Example in another area of life: my wife and I go places and, when it comes up, we tell people about them. If they ask or it's relevant, we show them photos. Mostly photos of the place, rather than us at the place (we take relatively few photos like that). What we don't do is just toss them all up on Facebook unbidden.

This is what I try to do, yes. But that means what I share is curated. It's curated to the person and to the context. In my experience, this causes people to take what I say more seriously. I think we all know that person whose recommendations are really just whatever they like, in no way tailored to the person they're recommending them to. I don't know about you, but I never give that person's suggestions much weight.

I don't have as much of a problem with just rating things, in part because it's understood it's a simplistic thing and, if anything, invites people to ask for elaboration.

I think you would've found your way to it eventually.

Gee, looks like an internet forum is indeed the best for discussions. Might be because that's exactly what it was made for! Even a personal blog is for broadcasting, too, just a longer form.

More like that your disinterest in broadcasting is hurting the strength (and scope) of your impact on others and since you don't seem to be interested in seeking out stuff in others' profiles either, it hurts the variety and eclecticism of your own taste. So it doesn't hurt the appreciation of the art you do watch, but rather it limits the scope of the art you experience, while also limiting the scope of your own influence on others.

Not sure why you attach ostentatious posing and performativeness to simply making your ratings public. I'm not denying some people rate stuff or fake their enjoyment for virtual social credit, but that virtual social credit, though it can be addictive, is all they can get. Plus you can see through the bullshit of people who do it quite fast anyway. It's not like people are pretending to like every "difficult", obscure, or outright grating work of art so that they can collect the rich rewards, both material and social, that society heaps on people who do so.

Again, you can do both at the same time. You can watch a film and experience it to its fullest and then you can think about its rating and a comment/review to attach to your rating that others will see. I don't think the latter influences the former unless somebody is a total fake.

Oops, I forgot you talk to people. I hardly do, not even about cinema anymore. Not even on the internet for the most part. I haven't had a real-life conversation where a book or a movie would just come up in years. All people I talk to daily are people I've known for years and they already know my taste, and when I want to recommend them something I do it straightforwardly. But then, there's the whole mass of people who might stumble upon my film-rating profiles online, and it's also partly for them that I keep logging stuff publicly.

But that's your private life, so plenty of reasons to keep your privacy. But I'm a *cinephile*, films are my life. Of course, I want to show my ratings to everybody. I want them to see my taste to get inspired and watch great films. BUT this is not really my gut feeling, just something I figured out is the best thing to do: to share with others. My initial impulse is to hide it, to be quiet about it. The gut feeling is that I should keep those masterpieces just for myself, that those normies are not worthy of them, and that those masterpieces would surpass their cognition anyway.

But then I humble myself because I know it's a wrong thing to think and that one should share one's love for cinema with everyone, and advertise cinema in all ways and forms, for another generation of cinephiles to come. We were all filthy normies at one point, but the point is to facilitate getting out of this sad predicament for others. That's why you should share what you love and what is legit, do it with audacity, and beat them over their heads with your Good-Taste-Hammers™, and scream your Always Right™ opinions on art into their ears. Call it performativeness, I call it giving what I once took. If a thousand people see your highest ratings and 20 of them are inspired to watch a film you love, that's already a great success. If you inspire even one of them to start their journey toward becoming a cinephile, it's like you gave a new life to them.

Gatekeeping can be good in some ways, but not in the way of keeping art gems to ourselves. We need to share, share, SHARE. As much as possible, as loudly as possible, as publicly as possible. And there's no better collective way to do it than simply creating a profile, rating stuff, and then allowing others to see it. They'll be finding great stuff on their own just by visiting your profile. Maybe you won't even know you made somebody a cinephile. But that's a mission completed in the least time and effort. You not only saved your soul but also a few others.

Recently, I've been doing this a tiny little bit, too. A few years ago I wouldn't, I'd just share my favorites, which were mostly impenetrable art films, and my idea was that if you're not interested in them, it's on you, that I already did my thing by sharing the best of the best in the art of film and if you can't appreciate it, it's your fault. But these days I'm getting soft and less peremptory. Sometimes I'm even understanding way too much for my own good, which undeniably is connected to how I myself quasi-forgot what real masterpieces feel like, my taste changed, morphed, and expanded. And I'm getting annoyed and even scared with my present-day servility. I miss the old days of being an opinionated and haughty "true" cinephile who half-seriously attacked people in the comments section under their low ratings for obvious masterpieces. I KNOW I was right, even though I also know that what I was doing wasn't necessarily polite.

I do or don't, depending on how good that person's taste is in general. A fellow cinephile once said he just recommends Pasolini's Salo to WHOEVER asks him for a film recommendation, no matter what they're looking for or like right now. He says that if they frown upon that recommendation, don't want to watch it, or watch it and hate it, they're not worth his time anyway. I look up to such haughty opinionatedness. I believe gatekeeping can be a good thing, a surefire and fast way to separate the wheat from the chaff - the "I'm not looking to make people movie buffs but full-blown cinephiles, and if they don't have the predispositions for that, freak 'em!". But I don't really think like this anymore. I'm much friendlier. As I've said, I've gotten weak. Even my year-long friends tell me that I'm less combative, snide, and snug.

I'm not that sure I would. And if I did, it'd be much later and it'd take me much longer. I think starting in nearly the exact order I did, with the exact same filmmakers was crucial for my development as a cinephile. I started from the very best and then downgraded. But now I can rewatch the very best and kind of return to my former glory while having the benefit of the incredible vastness of the lesser films I know.

Jeez, it's well past 1 AM and I'm just writing stupid stuff. I don't even know if what I wrote is true or not. I watched like 7 films today and I'm half-asleep already. Maybe I'm just putting on a persona of a smug cinephile. Or maybe I'm putting on the persona of a friendlier cinephile who talks about how he used to be a smug cinephile. Now THAT'S performativeness for you. But hey, I want to protect my privacy, too!