that puts everything in order again. Media producers will find their way through their current problems only by renegotiating their relationship with their consumers. Audiences, empowered by these new technologies, occupying a space at the intersection between old and new media, are demanding the right to participate within the culture. Producers who fail to make their peace with this new participatory culture will face declining goodwill and diminished revenues. The resulting struggles and compromises will define the public culture of the future.
1
Spoiling Survivor
The Anatomy of a Knowledge Community
Survivor (2000)—the astonishingly popular CBS show that started the reality television trend—does not just pit sixteen strangers against one another. Around each carefully crafted episode emerges another contest—a giant cat and mouse game that is played between the producers and the audience. Every week, the eagerly anticipated results are fodder for water cooler discussions and get reported as news, even on rival networks. Survivor is television for the Internet age—designed to be discussed, dissected, debated, predicted, and critiqued.
The Survivor winner is one of television’s most tightly guarded secrets. Executive producer Mark Burnett engages in disinformation campaigns trying to throw smoke in viewers’ eyes. Enormous fines are written into the contracts for the cast and crew members if they get caught leaking the results. And so a fascination has grown up around the order of the “boots” (the sequence in which the contestants get rejected from the tribe), the “final four” (the last four contestants in the competition), and especially around the “sole survivor” (the final winner of the million-dollar cash prize).
The audience is one of the largest in broadcast television. In its first eight seasons, Survivor rarely dipped out of the top ten highest-rated shows. The most hard-core fans, a contingent known as the “spoilers,” go to extraordinary lengths to ferret out the answers. They use satellite photographs to locate the base camp. They watch the taped episodes, frame by frame, looking for hidden information. They know Survivor inside out, and they are determined to figure it out—together—before the producers reveal what happened. They call this process “spoiling.”
Mark Burnett acknowledges this contest between producer and fans is part of what creates Survivor’s mystique: “With so much of our show shrouded in secrecy until it’s broadcast, it makes complete sense that many individuals consider it a challenge to try to gain information before it’s officially revealed—sort of like a code they are determined to crack. While it’s my job to keep our fans on their toes and stay one step ahead, it is fascinating to hear some of the lengths these individuals are willing to go.”1
Into this intense competition entered ChillOne. Before his sudden fame within the fan realm, he claimed to be a lurker who has never previously posted to a discussion list. On vacation in Brazil for New Year’s 2003, he said, he stumbled into a detailed account of who was going to get bumped from Survivor: Amazon, the series’s sixth season. He posted this information on the Internet and lived through months of intense grilling by the spoiling community to defend his reputation. To some, ChillOne was a hero, the best spoiler of all time. For others, he was a villain, the guy who destroyed the game for everyone else.
As we have seen, the age of media convergence enables communal, rather than individualistic, modes of reception. Not every media consumer interacts within a virtual community yet; some simply discuss what they see with their friends, family members, and workmates. But few watch television in total silence and isolation. For most of us, television provides fodder for so-called water cooler conversations. And, for a growing number of people, the water cooler has gone digital. Online forums offer an opportunity for participants to share their knowledge and opinions. In this chapter I hope to bring readers inside the spoiling community to learn more about how it works and how it impacts the reception of a popular television series.
My focus here is on the process and ethics of shared problem-solving in an online community. I am less interested, ultimately, in who ChillOne is or whether his information was accurate than I am with how the community responded to, evaluated, debated, critiqued, and came to grips with the kinds of knowledge he brought to them. I am interested in how the community reacts to a shift in its normal ways of processing and evaluating knowledge. It is at moments of crisis, conflict, and controversy that communities are forced to articulate the principles that guide them.2
Spoiling as Collective Intelligence
On the Internet, Pierre Lévy argues, people harness their individual expertise toward shared goals and objectives: “No one knows everything, everyone knows something, all knowledge resides in humanity.”3 Collective intelligence refers to this ability of virtual communities to leverage the combined expertise of their members. What we cannot know or do on our own, we may now be able to do collectively. And this organization of audiences into what Lévy calls knowledge communities allows them to exert a greater aggregate power in their negotiations with media producers. The emergent knowledge culture will never fully escape the influence of commodity culture, any more than commodity culture can totally function outside the constraints of the nation-state. He suggests, however, that collective intelligence will gradually alter the ways commodity culture operates. Lévy sees industry panic over audience participation as shortsighted: “By preventing the knowledge culture from becoming autonomous, they deprive the circuits of commodity space … of an extraordinary source of energy.”4 The knowledge culture, he suggests, serves as the “invisible and intangible engine” for the circulation and exchange of commodities.
The new knowledge culture has arisen as our ties to older forms of social community are breaking down, our rooting in physical geography is diminished, our bonds to the extended and even the nuclear family are disintegrating, and our allegiances to nation-states are being redefined. New forms of community are emerging, however: these new communities are defined through voluntary, temporary, and tactical affiliations, reaffirmed through common intellectual enterprises and emotional investments. Members may shift from one group to another as their interests and needs change, and they may belong to more than one community at the same time. These communities, however, are held together through the mutual production and reciprocal exchange of knowledge. As Levy writes, such groups “make available to the collective intellect all of the pertinent knowledge available to it at a given moment.” More importantly, they serve as sites for “collective discussion, negotiation, and development,” and they prod the individual members to seek out new information for the common good: “Unanswered questions will create tension … indicating regions where invention and innovation are required.”5
Lévy draws a distinction between shared knowledge, information that is believed to be true and held in common by the entire group, and collective intelligence, the sum total of information held individually by the members of the group that can be accessed in response to a specific question. He explains: “The knowledge of a thinking community is no longer a shared knowledge for it is now impossible for a single human being, or even a group of people, to master all knowledge, all skills. It is fundamentally collective knowledge, impossible to gather together into a single creature.”6 Only certain things are known by all—the things the community needs to sustain its existence and fulfill its goals. Everything else is known by individuals who are on call to share what they know when the occasion arises. But communities must closely scrutinize any information that is going to become part of their shared knowledge, since misinformation can lead to more and more misconceptions as any new insight is read against what the group believes to be core knowledge.
Survivor spoiling is collective intelligence in practice.
Each fan I spoke with had their own history of how they became a spoiler. Shawn was a history major who loved the process
