A Month Without Tracking
At the end of 2024 I decided that I would not do any performative tracking of my media consumption through websites or apps. This was mainly about reading books (Storygraph, Goodreads) but I extended it, with some exceptions, to TV, Movies, and Music.
The short version:
- Absolutely no logging books - reading progress, date finished, nothing
- Absolutely no logging TV shows - for example, via trackt.tv
- Using Letterboxd is okay but only log NEW movies watched
- My listening is hooked up to last.fm via Spotify, so that's automatic. Otherwise, leave it alone
Here's how it's going, media-by-media.
Reading
I'm doing well with this. I am constantly tempted to open up Storygraph and at least enter what books I've finished reading so far. I've come close! The good thing is that I removed the app from my phone, so I have to access via the web version. I've only used it to send links of what I'm reading to other people, but have not logged in or added reading progress or anything.
This will be a long-running temptation. I have a valid argument for logging what I've finished: I would be doing it for me. I don't actively share my book progress unless I have something to say about it. Counter-argument: if it's just for me, then I don't need to put it online at all.
I have a compromise: at the end of the year I could manually put together a gallery of the book covers I finished in 2025 in a blog post. The nefarious part of that plan is that it involves going through the books I read and finding links to all of the covers and doing it all by hand, so I might just get lazy and not do it.
TV Shows
No-brainer. I never started logging watched TV shows and had no interest in starting an account on Trackt.tv.
Movies
I backtracked on this one. As stated I only wanted to log new movies I watch, not log movies I've seen before. I quickly went against this last month by logging all three original Pirates of the Caribbean films. Technically I hadn't logged them in Letterboxd before, so I can rationalize it that way. In reality I enjoy the process of logging films on Letterboxd and giving them a little review, and seeing what friends have said about the same movies.
I'm still not going to log random movies tuned into on TV, though.
Music
Music tracking is almost 100% passive in this case. I connected Spotify with my Last.FM profile so it's a "set it and forget it" situation. However, when I listen to music from my library via iPod, I have to open a Last.FM app and scan what I've played to "scrobble" the music. I haven't been able to resist that one.
What I have done is turn off any automatic sharing of my weekly listening stats on Mastodon. I had a link set up to do this for me but turning it off removes part of the performative tracking. I really don't know why I am tracking music at all, I don't use it for anything. I suppose that's why I wanted to turn it off altogether, but couldn't be bothered when it was automatic.
I'm also not using Open Scrobbler to manually enter when I listen to a specific song or album offline (i.e. a CD or cassette or vinyl). That is time sync that's not worth it for me.
I have to think about Last.FM some more.
That's all I have. Overall I give myself a barely passing grade but I'm pleased that I haven't fallen into old habits when it comes to book logging.
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