Why we love to keep tabs on what we’re watching and reading

Sites such as Letterboxd and GoodReads encourage us to document our cultural consumption. But does gamification get in the way of actually enjoying the arts?

The end credits are still rolling when I open up my JustWatch app to mark Luca Guadagnino’s seductive psychodrama A Bigger Splash as “Seen”, complete with satisfying green tick. I click on my Letterboxd account to do the same, logging the date I watched it, before scrolling back and finding my sense of achievement disintegrate into guilt that I have only managed to watch a measly two films in the whole of April.

I am one of millions for whom religiously tracking their cultural intake has become as instinctive as recording their steps, workouts, calorie count or periods. Letterboxd – dubbed “the social network for film-lovers”, who can log, review and discuss films with other members – recently hit 6 million members. The Amazon-owned GoodReads, which has been doing the same for books for the past 15 years, has a community of 140 million, with 5.1 million thus far pledged to take part in its 2022 Reading Challenge in which users set a target number of books to read over 12 months. Meanwhile, IMDb has more than 1 billion user reviews logged. Like wellness before it, cultural consumption has become yet another opportunity for us to measure, analyse and optimise our lives using cold, hard data.