someone asked whether this might be a hoax.
It began innocently enough: “I have just returned from Brazil and a trip to the Amazon. … I will begin by saying that I do not have all the answers, or all the information about S6 [Survivor 6], but I have enough credible, spoiler type, information that I’d be open to sharing.”8
Images from Space
We would learn later that ChillOne had gone on vacation with a bunch of friends to Rio to celebrate the New Year but had wanted to see more of the country. He made his way to the Amazon and then learned that the Ariau Amazon Towers had been the headquarters for the Survivor production staff, and as a fan of the series he wanted to see the locations firsthand. He wasn’t a spoiler; he mostly asked questions of the hotel staff trying to figure out what might be meaningful sites on a Survivor-themed tour of the Amazon. Whereas most of the people who came there were eco-tourists who wanted to see nature untouched by human presence, he was a tele-tourist trying to visit a location made meaningful because it was transmitted by television.
His first post focused primarily around the shooting location: “First off, the map posted by Wezzie is very accurate. Let me start by filling in some of the gaps.” This was a bold opening move, as “Wezzie” is one of the most respected members of the Survivor spoiling community. She and her partner, Dan Bollinger, have specialized in location spoiling. Offline, Wezzie is a substitute teacher, an arboretum docent, a travel agent, and a freelance writer. Dan is an industrial designer who runs a factory that makes refrigerator magnets. They live halfway across the country from each other, but they work as a team to try to identify and document the next Survivor location—what Mark Burnett calls “the seventeenth character”—and to learn as much as they can about the area. As a team, Wezzie and Dan have been able to pinpoint the series location with astonishing accuracy. The process may start with a throwaway comment from Mark Burnett or a tip from “somebody who knows somebody, who knows somebody, who works for CBS or a tourist company.”9 Wezzie and Dan have built up contacts with travel agencies, government officials, film bureaus, tourism directors, and resort operators. As Dan notes, “Word gets around the tourism industry very quickly about a large project that will be bringing in millions of American dollars.”
Flashback to Twin Peaks
My first introduction to the Internet, and to online fan communities, came in 1991 through alt.tv.twinpeaks.1 Looking back, it is remarkable how much the discussion around the series was already starting to resemble one of Pierre Lévy’s knowledge communities. The group emerged within just a few weeks after the first episode of David Lynch’s quirky detective series aired and rapidly became one of the largest and most active discussion lists in the early Internet era, attracting by some estimates 25,000 readers (although a substantially smaller number of posters). The discussion group served many functions for its participants. Fans worked together to compile charts showing all of the series events or compilations of important bits of dialogue; they shared what they could find about the series in local papers; they used the Internet to locate tapes if they missed episodes; they traced through the complex grid of references to other films, television series, songs, novels, and other popular texts, matching wits with what they saw as a trickster author always trying to throw them off his trail. But, more than anything else, the list functioned as a space where people could pull together the clues and vet their speculations concerning the central narrative hook—who killed Laura Palmer? The pressure on the group mounted as the moment of dramatic revelation approached: “Break the code, solve the crime. We’ve only got four days left.” In many ways, Twin Peaks was the perfect text for a computer-based community, combining the narrative complexity of a mystery with the complex character relationships of a soap opera and a serialized structure that left much unresolved and subject to debate from week to week.
The online community was fascinated to discover what it was like to work together, several thousand strong, in making sense of what they were watching, and they were all using recently acquired VCRs to go back through the tapes, again and again, looking for what they had missed. As one fan commented, “Video recording has made it possible to treat film like a manuscript, to be pored over and deciphered.” Those on the periphery were astonished by the kinds of information they could compile and process, sometimes confusing the combined knowledge of the group with individual expertise: “Tell me! Tell me! How many times are people watching TP? Do you take notes on every subject as you are watching? Or, when a question comes up do you drag out each of the episodes, grab a yellow pad, some popcorn and start watching? Do you have a photographic memory? … Do you enjoy making the rest of us feel stupid?”
While most critics complained that Twin Peaks became so complicated that it was nearing incomprehensibility as the season continued, the fan community began to complain that the series was becoming too predictable. The community’s ability to pool its collective resources was placing new demands on the series that no television production of the time would have been capable of satisfying. To keep themselves entertained, they were spinning out elaborate conspiracy theories and explanations that were more interesting, because they were more layered than would ever be aired. In the end, they felt betrayed because Lynch could not stay one step ahead of them. This should have been our first sign that there was going to be tension ahead between media producers and consumers. As one disappointed fan protested, “After so much build up, so much analysis, so much waiting and so many false clues, how can any answer totally satisfy the anticipation that has built up. If WKLP is firmly resolved on the 11/10 episode we will all be in for a huge let down. Even those who guessed right will only celebrate and gloat briefly and then be left empty inside.” Television would have to become more sophisticated if it wanted to keep up with its most committed viewers.
From there, they start narrowing things down by looking at the demands of the production. Wezzie describes the process: “We look at latitude, climate, political stability, population density, road system, ports, accommodations, attractions, culture, predominant religion, and proximity to past Survivor locations.” Dan notes, “In Africa I overlaid demographic maps of population, agricultural areas, national reserves, tourism destinations and even city lights seen from satellites at night. Sometimes knowing where Survivor can’t be is important. That’s how I found Shaba Reserve.”
Wezzie is the people person: she works their network to pull together as much data as she can. Wezzie adds, “Then Dan works his magic!” Dan has developed contact with the Denver-based Space Imaging Company, owner of IKONOS, a high-resolution commercial remote-sensing satellite. Eager to show off what their satellite can do, IKONOS took snapshots of the location for Survivor: Africa that Dan had identified from 423 miles in space, and upon closer scrutiny, they could decipher specific buildings in the production compound, including the temporary production buildings, the tribal council site, and a row of Massai-style huts where the contestants would live, eat, and sleep. They take the snapshots from space because the security-conscious Burnett negotiates a “no fly zone” policy over the location. Dan uses the Com Sat (Communications Satellite) images and sophisticated topographical maps to refine his understanding of the core locations. Meanwhile, Wezzie researches the ecosystem and culture. Everything she learns ends up on Survivor maps and becomes a resource for the fan community. And, after all of that, they still sometimes get it wrong. For example, they focused a lot of energy on a location in Mexico, only to learn that the new series was going to be filmed in the Pearl Islands near Panama. They weren’t totally wrong, though—they had identified the location for a production company filming another reality television series.
The fan community has come to trust Wezzie and Dan to do an incredible amount of homework and ensure the accuracy of their posts. They also have a reputation as neutral observers who speak from above the fray. On the one hand, it was pretty cheeky for ChillOne to try to correct their map on his first post, a volley over the bow of the established spoiling community. On the other, it was smart, because the geographical information was the most easily confirmed. He posted
