Leana Paparella
Letterboxd is social networking service dedicated to film lovers. It was launched in October 2011 in Auckland, New Zealand. The social app was co-founded by Matthew Buchanan and Karl von Randow, who craft and maintain the app alongside a small team of developers and designers. Letterboxd started out as a website, and eventually became accessible as an app for iOS, Android, and Apple TV. On their “About” section on their website, Letterboxd is defined as “A global social network for grass-roots film discussion and discovery. Use it as a diary to record and share your opinion about films as you watch them, or just to keep track of films you’ve seen in the past.” (Letterboxd Limited, 2020, About Letterboxd). The main goal of Letterboxd is for its users to share their opinions and reviews about films with other users, to discover new films and to keep track of their own favourite films on their personal profile. Its objective is to create a modern and creative space for movie buffs to interact and engage in open discourse about films, connecting with like-minded people. Its name, ‘Letterboxd’, refers to the black horizontal bars that frame movies. Their website mentions that “Letterboxd is named for our love of the widescreen format, and has nothing whatsoever to do with orienteering or that thing in Stand By Me.” (Letterboxd Limited, 2020, Why is it called Letterboxd?). The interface affordances include various features for users to engage with. The website briefly lists the main ones; “Showcase your favorites on your profile page. Rate, review and tag films as you add them. Find and follow your friends to see what they’re enjoying. Keep a watchlist of films you’d like to see, and create lists/collections on any given topic.” (Letterboxd Limited, 2020, Letterboxd). On the app, users can rank movies from 1 to 5 stars. They can leave reviews along with their star ranking, view other people’s reviews and choose to “like” them. There is the ability to tag key words on film lists in addition to reviews, similarly to the use of hashtags on other social media platforms. Letterboxd users have their own profiles where they can indicate their favourite movies, view all of their ratings, indicate which films they have watched, create a watchlist for films they would like to watch, see which films they have liked, and view the users they are following as well as the users they follow. Within the app, there is an Explore page where users can see what is popular at the moment (Films, Reviews, Lists). There is also a search page, an Activity page, and an option to add diary entries for films. When searching for a film, it is possible to watch the trailer, see the film data such as the actors and film crew (provided by TMDb), and there is an option to share the film externally. The number of selections may seem overwhelming, but the developers have designed Letterboxd to present these functions in a simple and user-friendly fashion. Chan (2016) writes, “Even if you’ve never used Letterboxd before, if you pick up the app and sign up for a free account, everything is pretty organized and straightforward, so there isn’t a lot to learn.” (AppAdvice.com). All of these features allow for a multitude of interactive allowances between users that focus on their love of film. Thus, the type of media and interactions it promotes are text-based and allow for discovery of new films and similar people where communities of movie buffs are accommodated.
The app is catered to young adults, and a lot of the language used mirrors the viral language used on Twitter, which can be considered funny and relatable. Many users leave reviews referencing memes and trendy phrases often seen on other popular social media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter and Tik Tok. The reviews take more of the form of one-liner casual comical comments than a paragraph on a Rotten Tomatoes film review. For example, user @mahershalaali writes, “gonna create another rivalry like edward vs jacob…. im team john ambrose bitch we love a short king” as her review for the new Netflix rom-com To All the Boys: P.S. I Still Love You (2020). Parks proposes that, “The internal rhetoric of social network sites often valorizes communal language and imagery as well” (2011, p. 42), which relates to the phenomenon of Letterboxd users connecting over similar use of trendy language and memes made popular by recent trends on the internet.
Letterboxd can be compared to the music-streaming app Spotify, but instead of music, Letterboxd is for movies. This is due to the ability to create playlists, but for films instead of songs, and to see and share other user’s lists. These lists can get creative and humorous – for instance, user Demi created a list of movies called “movies whose full title can be perfectly and comfortably sung to the rhythm and cadence of the ‘I know who I want to take me home’ part of ‘closing time’”, and user Katie created one called “male directed films about women that get it right”. Since the app is catered to movie watchers and visually inclined people, the design layout of the app is very aesthetically pleasing and clean. The app mirrors the organized simplicity of the original website. Letterboxd uses movie posters as indicators of films in lists throughout the app, which makes it pleasing to the eye and fun to use.
Considering the affordances that Letterboxd provides and the virtual modes of communication it pushes forward, it can be considered a social media. Carr and Hayes (2015) define social media as “Internet-based channels that allow users to opportunistically interact and selectively self-present, either in real-time or asynchronously, […].” (p. 50). All of these elements apply to Letterboxd as a medium of social interactivity. The internet-based app promotes communication between users who present themselves in a certain way through persistent channels. The aspect of self-presentation on Letterboxd is quite significant because it differs from other popular social media like Facebook and Instagram. On these social networking websites, users often choose to present themselves through more generalized perceptions of who they are on a more basic level. Most users, out of convenience, present themselves using their real names, pictures of themselves, and post about their daily lives. However, on Letterboxd, users curate how they choose to present themselves according to the overall objective of the app, which is to share user-generated content about movies. Thus, users will utilize self-presentation on their profiles by identifying themselves with their favourite movies, ratings, and reviews, and will often leave out any other basic personal information about themselves. The way they choose to construct their profile is deliberately crafted in order to mark their unique personality and their place in specific communities of society. For example, user Karen’s Letterbox profile bio reads, “I like movies that make me feel good and movies that make me feel bad.” The way she chooses to represent herself is based solely on her movie preferences, and the way she reviews movies. Her profile allows us to see which movies she watched on which days and all of her reviews. Karen, who has acquired 7,069 followers, has done so uniquely through her taste in films. Moreover, Letterboxd is a space where users present themselves in more specific, niche ways than on other social media used for basic identification.
In continuing with the analysis of Letterboxd as a unique space for curated self-representation, online communities on the app have been born from these subcultures of movie buffs who express themselves through film consumption. Parks (2011) writes, “three types of social affordances are required for the formation of virtual communities on social networking sites: affordances of membership, expression, and connection.” (p. 56). In reference to Parks’ argument, the virtual communities present on Letterboxd – film critics, indie movie lovers, Marvel and DC fans, documentary buffs, and so on – are given the opportunity to find each other through the app’s social affordances that Parks lists. Letterboxd offers several membership options (free, PRO, and PATRON), expression (customizable profile) and connection (to follow and be followed by other users). Furthermore, Letterboxd’s multiple diverse communities of movie fans can interact within groups of similar movie interests, and even branch out if need be.
In conclusion, Letterboxd is ranked #180 on the Social Networking category on the App Store, so it is not the most popular social media app on the market. Still, there is a significant number of users who love it, which can be dictated by its 4.8 star rating sourced from three thousand ratings. It is an app that is made to be used by a niche crowd of movie buffs but is also user-friendly enough to be downloaded by anyone who wants to discover movies. The social media boasts an aesthetically pleasing minimalistic design, and encourages self-presentation and the formation of communities within the app. Letterboxd encourages light-hearted socialization through casual movie reviews and user-generated movie playlists. This enables a modern extension of social film discovery and virtual connection between like-minded individuals.
References
Carr, C. T., & Hayes, R. A. (2015). Social Media: Defining, Developing, and Divining. Atlantic Journal of Communication, 23(1), 46–65. https://0-doi-org.mercury.concordia.ca/10.1080/15456870.2015.972282
Chan, C. (2016). Letterboxd is a beautiful app for film connoisseurs. AppAdvice. Retrieved from https://appadvice.com/review/letterboxd
Frequent questions – Letterboxd. (2020). Retrieved from https://letterboxd.com/about/frequent-questions/
Parks, M. (2011). Social network sites as virtual communities. In Z. Papacharissi (Ed.), A networked self: Identity, community, and culture on social network sites (pp. 39-58). New York, NY: Routledge.
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