On Media Consumption & Logging

Date: 2025-10-31

Why Log Media Consumption?

Memory is fickle, most of us have struggled to remember what we've read, watched, played, or listened to. I believe that our memory of things is often the only proof that they actually happened, and many Americans spend hours of their lives engaging with the arts that it seems a waste to let any of it be entirely forgotten. Logging our engagement also makes it easier to analyze our media engagement in a variety of ways:

Find common patterns in media that we are drawn to
Recommend media to others based on common themes
For arts students and professionals: have a larger repository to pull from when writing about the arts

Challenges To Logging Media Consumption

Recommendation algorithms and platform policies can have a profound effect on our media consumption and how we engage with the world. Media streaming and curation platforms choose to delete content from their databases often, as is their right. This presents a problem for those wishing to fully log their media engagement or engage with the arts on their own terms: when content is removed, your history goes with it.

My Approach

My solution to this problem is as simple as it gets, a set of CSV files that I keep in a private Git repository. Using CSV files keeps logging portable, versionable, and easily searchable.

books.csv - Books that I've read (103 entries)
channels.csv - active channels on various platforms whose content I enjoy (48 entries)
childrens_books.csv - Children's and YA books that I've read (81 entries)
comics.csv - Graphic novels that I've read (686 entries)
games.csv - Games that I've completed (365 entries)
music.csv - Albums I've listened to (1267 entries)
TBL.csv - Albums that I've been recommended (435 entries)
TBR.csv - Books that I've been recommended (77 entries)

A luxury of CSV files and spreadsheets is that it is entirely up to the individual what each field represents: mine are not particularly elaborate, but there is infinite room for expansion.

Examples

I delimit fields with a semicolon instead of a comma because a significant number of titles include commas.

books.csv, childrens_books.csv, & comics.csv

Title;Author(s);Genre;Date
Moby Dick;Herman Melville;Adventure;08/12/2022

channels.csv

Title;Platform;Genre;Link
Bread on Penguins;YouTube;Technology;https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwHwDuNd9lCdA7chyyquDXw

games.csv

Title;Platform;Genre;Date
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain;PC;Stealth;9/20/2015

music.csv

Artist;Album;Genre;Date
Tom Waits;Nighthawks at the Diner;Blues;05/19/2020

TBL.csv

Artist;Album;Genre
Hulder;Verses In Oath;Metal, Black

TBR.csv

Title;Author;Genre
The Buffalo Hunter Hunter;Stephen Graham Jones;Horror

Escaping The Noise

The internet was once a haven for hyperspecific communities, but it has been drifting further and further towards black box recommendation algorithms that push the statistically safest content.

I do not believe that the problem is corporate ownership itself—private companies can run however they like—but the vendor lock-in that follows. Your watch history, your playlists, even the fact that you read a book can be erased overnight.

The current era often feels like a blur of content and messaging from every conceivable corner of society. There is not a realistic way to avoid this noise entirely, but I've found a few methods that help control it.

Discovering New Media

Instead of relying on algorithms to find new music, I follow labels directly through their website if they have one or their Bandcamp if they do not. I find new labels and standout albums by checking the top posts on genre subreddits about twice a year and interacting with people at record stores. I apply the same approach to literature.

YouTube Playlists

Rather than using YouTube playlists that require a Google account (which results in targeted recommendations), I copy the links to each video (one per line) into a file which I save with the extension m3u, which can be played with MPV as a playlist (provided you have yt-dlp installed).

Channels

Most streaming services (e.g. Twitch, YouTube) provide RSS feeds for the channels they host, allowing you to centralize your feed without the intrusion of recommendation algorithms or advertisements. I personally like Fluent Reader (GUI) and Newsboat (CLI).