I’ve never been a die-hard fan of social media, but I’ve always loved films. For this reason, the very first degree that I began to pursue was one in film theory and film history, and the first major writing project I completed was a feature-length script when I was nineteen. My first job was working in a local video store. It was one of the last of the true punk video stores that existed in my part of California, and it was a magical experience. I am forever grateful for the few years that I had with it before it finally closed its doors.
“I've never been a die-hard fan of social media, but I've always loved films.”
But when it comes to connecting with a larger community of movie lovers, I’ve actually always felt a bit distanced, a bit isolated. That might partially be because I’ve never committed to connecting to the social media crowd in the same way that so many others have, where communities form through shared tastes in a remote network setting. I’ve definitely found connections and communities online to a certain degree, but movie communities, not so much.
Back when I was pursuing film, people told me that I should write for Rotten Tomatoes or start trying to create a film blog with my thoughts. That interested me somewhat, but the concept of writing on a site like Rotten Tomatoes always bothered me for a reason I couldn't articulate early on.
Only within the last decade have I gathered the skills and knowledge necessary to articulate exactly why sites like Rotten Tomatoes and IMDb bother me so very much.
“Your information, everything that you're putting out there... is permanently invested on someone else's computer.”
On these sites, your information, everything that you’re putting out there, all of that work that you do curating and connecting and building writing is permanently invested on someone else's computer. It's permanently locked into someone else's system.
If that website goes away, changes hands, or if you want to move—well, too bad. At best you might be able to export some of your data, especially if you live in a country or state with good data privacy laws. But that community and all of that work building yourself an identity in that space goes away.
Worse still, so many sites, especially social media sites, make it really difficult to export your media, even if they do provide a legally required method of doing so.
I never got into posting on those social media sites for movie lovers, and as the years went by, I also stopped frequenting them for recommendations. I found the recommendations to be somewhat facile, lacking in substance and clarity of thought—rushed, hasty, and limited.
However, recently, a new one of these networks has come into my field of attention. It’s called Letterboxd, and folks seem to really love it. It seems to have engendered that real community spirit that I think a lot of us miss from the earlier halcyon days of the internet.
“Letterboxd has grown into a kind of digital town square for cinephiles, a place where the act of watching a movie is just the beginning of a larger social conversation.” (The New York Times Magazine via Longreads)
It sounds like it gives people a great platform which to share and to connect. I also really like the fact that it has a rental store feature that allows you to rent films digitally that you might not otherwise be able to locate. Films that are curated by real people watching and exploring the films that might not make the big listicles or the Netflix top 20.
That’s wonderful because that means that you’re directly interacting with the experiences that other people have with the things that they love. You are able to escape the very icky trap set by so many other services, like Netflix or Amazon, that lock in and silo your experience to a very limited place.
So, there is a lot to be appreciated about Letterboxd, and I clearly need to take a slightly closer look. But what I am ultimately becoming increasingly fixated by is the idea of data ownership and data sovereignty, while still being able to connect socially.
“My primary focus going forward is to look into and to build systems where your data remains yours.”
My primary focus going forward is to look into and to build systems where your data remains yours, where all of your hard work, your curation, and quite literally, the digital identities and keys to the kingdom of your friends and social group remain yours.
Maybe Letterboxd can be part of that better digital future. Maybe it’s just a stepping stone, a way sign on the path to that better future.
I don’t know, but I will say the feature I love the most is being able to go find films that aren’t available elsewhere, and explore real human curation of the incredible art being produced for film—art that otherwise isn’t getting seen. That's wonderful, and it's a feature that I'd want to be part of a real decentralized web.
About the Author
I’m Odin Halvorson, a librarian, life coach, and fiction author. If you like my work and want to support what we do here at Unenlightened Generalists, please consider becoming a paid subscriber to our newsletter for as little as $2.50 a month!
Support us in other ways:
- Start writing and reading with the Supernote, and support me at the same time!
- Like audiobooks? Hate DRM? Use this affiliate link to sign up for Libro.fm, where you actually own the books you buy!
- Want your own Ghost newsletter? Check out MagicPages for the cheapest hosting rates via my affiliate link (they even offer lifetime hosting plans!)
Thanks for your support!