"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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What we don't do is just toss them all up on Facebook unbidden.
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.
But that means what I share is curated. It's curated to the person and to the context.
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 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 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 think you would've found your way to it eventually.
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!