Year of Not Tracking
I toyed around with this thought a few years ago, giving it a nice fancy title of "The Year of Not Tracking". It was centered on not tracking books specifically but I think I'm going to extend it to all media. The push it took me to decide to stop tracking my consumption online was Trakt.tv. I don't know much about the site, except that it's main function is to track TV shows you watch, and I guess it extends to movies as well.
Anyway, I had the brief thought of creating an account and tracking the shows that I'm watching. But...why? What's the point? The point would be for me to keep track of what I've watched. OK, so do I need to broadcast that to the rest of the Internet, by creating yet another account somewhere? Not really.
So that's where I come back to avoiding tracking media consumption in general. The idea first came to me as I decided I didn't really want to set a reading goal for 2025, and then thought that maybe, wouldn't it be nice to just read a book without tracking my progress and reviewing it when I'm done? (The answer is: yes, it would.)
I don't begrudge anyone who enjoys tracking and displaying their online data - that's a personal choice, and until today I myself enjoyed doing that. I won't lie, these databases are super convenient for sharing information and getting a picture into someone's taste in books, movies, and music. I understand how tempting it is to have these services show you what your year looked like at a glance as we near the end of 2024.
But I don't think that's for me anymore. I'm not becoming more private, and retreating from the public or anything like that. I just don't want to feel beholden to these services. Plus, even if I didn't set a reading goal, I think I would probably feel pressure to keep reading books and marking them as complete, as many as possible.
One of the things that pushed me over the fence was trying out Apple Music. I switched all of my playlists and liked songs etc. from Spotify to Apple Music so I could give it a proper trial, and realized that Last.FM doesn't have automatic scrobbling built-in. There are ways to get around the issue, but I realized that if I do switch to AM, I don't feel like going through the hoops to track my listening. I'm OK with not sharing my listening data with everyone. I don't know if I'm sticking to Apple Music, but at least I'm at peace with not being able to connect directly to Last.FM.
I will keep a little notebook to keep track of books I've read and dates I complete them, and probably find a notebook to track TV shows and whatnot (just so I know what I'm currently watching! There's so much TV!), but unless I specifically write about it online, I'm not going to track it anywhere.
However, I am making one exception: Letterboxd. I really like the website and tracking movies this way. It's relatively simple in concept, and it helps me keep track of movies that I want to watch or re-watch. Mostly the "to watch" list are either movies I haven't seen but want to, or new releases. The way I'll "excuse myself" for tracking something when I'm not supposed to be tracking, I'm just not going to log any movies I've already logged (so if I watch another Harry Potter movie in the next few weeks, I'm not going to log it again - but if I get around to watching Woman of the Hour I'm going to log that one).
So anyway, yeah...broadcasting this now so I don't feel tempted to talk about it in 2025 to draw attention to it. January 1st, I'm going cold turkey.
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