went further: “C1 may very well play the role of puppetmaster that guides us merrily along until the unexpected happens. Afterwards, there may be more planted spoilers, false leaks and doctored evidence unveiled to throw new curves into the mix. Ultimately, I’ll be thrilled if MB and CBS have taken the reins in an effort to ‘work’ the spoiler community once again.”
By the final weeks of the season, the rumors and theories had reached gargantuan proportions. One side was embracing a fantasy of the producers engaging in some form of cloak and dagger theatrics. The other side was embracing a fantasy of finally beating the “Evil Pecker” at his own game.
One of the most outrageous theories was that ChillOne was Rob, who had been an active poster on the boards before he was chosen as a contestant on the series. The fan community saw Rob as one of their own, sent in to enliven the sixth season, with his witty comments and dirty tricks. He seemed more interested in producing a fan-friendly drama than in winning the game. What if he had taken all of it a step farther and was manipulating the boards just as he was manipulating the other players? Rob certainly knew about the rumors and is said to have wanted to wear an “I am ChillOne” T-shirt at the Survivor reunion broadcast as a joke.
There is a long history of interaction between the fans and the Survivor contestants, many of whom became active participants on the boards, sometimes under their own name, sometimes under assumed names, once they were booted. Contestants read the fan boards to see how they were coming across on the air. Fans fired off e-mails to several former contestants as they sought to confirm the ChillOne posts, asking them questions about how the production process worked. Deena, one of the other Survivor: Amazon contestants, acknowledged, after the fact, that she had followed the ChillOne debates with great interest and threw her own wrench into the discussion: “Pretty good spoilers if you ask me, and it was a little disappointing because here I am under contract not to open my mouth and somebody already is. I think this board as a whole, would have liked this season much more if there had been no ChillOne. As to the mysterious boat driver … never saw anybody like the description given. Production members, those that have contact with us, are generally repeaters and those who have gained the supersecretpass.”
Others were less romantic in their theories, continuing to suspect that they were dealing with a garden-variety hoax: “When will you learn? How many times has a mysterious new person shown up out of the blue to post spoilers? These ‘super spoilers’ are always huge fans of the show who know lots of info and have lots of insight about previous incarnations of the series, but they just never bothered to ever post on any message board until this amazing spoiler just fell into their lap.” The most common reference point there was the “Uncle Cameraman” exploit a few seasons back. A young poster had claimed that his uncle was a cameraman and had started telling him things to watch for. He posted a list of the boot order and had the good fortune to get the first several right, including some rather unlikely twists of fate. He developed something of a following before his “uncle” was revealed to be a fabrication. “Uncle Cameraman” had become a running joke in the spoiling community, so ChillOne’s source quickly got labeled “Uncle Boatman.”
There had been lots of hoaxes—some of which had enough good information to make the bad data plausible, at least for a little while. Some posted hoaxes to get attention, some because they hated the spoilers and wanted them to waste their time, some to see if they could outsmart the spoilers. As one fan explained, “[Don’t] assume that everyone comes to these boards for the same reason. Spoiling Survivor is a game. Spoiling the Survivor spoilers is a game. Planting fakes to see how long they go is a game. Spoiling certain elite spoiling groups is a game. … Many people come to play at this big wide open amusement park, and some of them could be playing with you.”
The challenge was to construct a hoax that was plausible enough to get past the initial screening and occupy attention over a longer period of time. In the beginning, it was enough to claim to have a list of the names of the contestants and some explanation of how you got it. Soon, you had to produce names of real people who could be located using search engines, and those real people had to match the profile of the series. You had to weave into your list the names of some of the folks the spoilers had already outed so that it confirmed the group’s consensus. After a while, people were producing fake photographs or; in some cases, photographs taken out of context. As one post explains, “It’s like a chess game. Hoaxer makes the first move. If it’s bad, it’s checkmate very quickly. Others, like this thread, are a bit more challenging and take longer to play out.”
If ChillOne was a hoax, he was a very good one. As one board member explained, “To concoct all this and create all the component pieces would be a lot of work and quite hard to do. Creating complicated lies and then sustaining them for weeks under interrogation is very hard. Keeping track of lies and inventing additional layers of lies to ‘substantiate’ the big lies is just a very difficult task.”
As for ChillOne, after several weeks of such abuse, he threw up his hands: “My information is out there. Read into it as much as you like. Choose to believe what you like, choose to not believe what you like. Poke holes in that which you desire. Pat me on the back as you see fit. This is all fine by me. I heard what I heard.” But he never really went away. By the next day, he was in there again, taking on all challengers, and he stuck it out to the bitter end.
Collective Intelligence and the Expert Paradigm
As more and more of his claims came true, the focus shifted away from discrediting ChillOne. The more accurate he was, the angrier it made some people. He hadn’t “spoiled” the season; he “ruined” it. These were fundamental questions: Was spoiling a goal or a process? Was it an individual sport, in which contestants won bragging rights based on nailing information, or a collaborative sport, in which the team rejoiced in its collective victory? As one participant grumbled, “We have turned spoiling into a non-cooperative game. … ‘Winning’ means spoiling the whole season; hiding how you know about it and making others second guess you all season so you can humiliate them. ChillOne won. Everybody else lost.”
Monitoring Big Brother
Survivor is not the only reality television series whose fans and followers formed large-scale collaborative knowledge communities to unearth secrets, nor was it the only series where such efforts resulted in an antagonistic relationship between producers and consumers. Endemol, the Dutch production company that controls the worldwide Big Brother franchise, saw the Internet as an important dimension of its production and promotion strategy. The Web site for American Big Brother attracted 4.2 million visitors during its first season. Hard-core Big Brother fans paid to watch the action unfold in the household 24/7 throughout the entire run of the series with multiple webcams showing interactions in different rooms of the house. If the challenge of spoiling Survivor was a scarcity of officially released information, the challenge of Big Brother was that there was simply too much information for any given viewer to consume and process. The most hard-core consumers organized into shifts, agreeing to monitor and transcribe relevant conversations and posting them on discussion boards.
Fans regard the broadcast version as a family-friendly digest of the much racier and more provocative Web feed, and they are drawn toward talking about things they know were hidden from people who watch only the televised content. Season Three’s resident sexpot, Chiara, naïvely tried to create a “secret code” that would allow her and the other “houseguests” to talk about personal matters without being exposed to the Internet voyeurs. Unfortunately, she worked out the code while being Webcast, generating much bemusement among the fan base, until the producers called her aside and explained the error in her logic. Subscribers complained, however, when the producers cut away at key moments—notably competitions, voting, and discussions central to the game play—so that they could hold content in reserve for the actual television series.
In the first season, the fans pushed
