contestants from the outside world. A group calling itself the Media Jammers, which spun from discussions of the series on Salon.com, sought to get information into the Big Brother house by throwing messages contained in tennis balls into the yard, by shouting through megaphones, and by hiring airplanes to fly streaming messages over the production site. They wanted a mass walkout of all the contestants midseason to “raise awareness of the abuses the producers have committed against the contestants, the families, and the viewers of the show.” The viewers could monitor the impact of their efforts on the “houseguests” as the producers called them (or the “hamsters” as the fans did) using the live Internet feed. They could coordinate their efforts via Internet chat groups and come up with real-time tactics even as they watched the producers trying to shield the show’s participants from their messages.
Pam Wilson has offered a detailed account of what she calls “narrative activism,” the effort of these viewers to shape the televised events:
A window of opportunity emerged for only a brief period of time, allowing for the invasion of a slickly produced corporate television game show by amateur narrative terrorists whose weapons were clever words rather than bombs. The intervention could perhaps only have happened once, during a period of technological and programmatic flux, when the format was new, the formula was flexible, the unscripted narrative was emerging from the psyches of the not-yet-jaded improvisational players, the events were being closely followed around the clock by avid on-line viewers, and the Hollywood set was relatively unprotected.1
The effort was surprisingly effective, forcing the contestants to rethink their affiliation with the series, and the network to periodically shut down the live feed as it was trying to thwart a full-scale revolt.
From the start, sourcing—getting information from direct and often unidentified sources—had been a controversial practice. Snewser had an inside source, for example, which allowed him to post the results of the show a few hours before airtime; it was there if you wanted to read ahead, but it didn’t get in the way of the group’s deliberations until the last possible minute. Sourcing was a game only some could play; it depended on privileged access to information, and since the sources couldn’t be revealed, sourced information was not subject to meaningful challenge and disconfirmation. Wezzie and Dan had made a specialization out of tracking down the locations. Not everyone has access to satellite data. Not everyone could play the game the way they did. But, ultimately, what they brought to the group was shared knowledge that could fuel a range of theories and speculation and that other group members could mine as they needed in the collaborative process of spoiling. By contrast, other forms of “spoiling”—making guesses based on weight loss or facial hair, reading the editing patterns of episodes, or interpreting comments by Mark Burnett or Jeff Probst—enabled collective participation. Everyone could play, contribute their expertise, apply their puzzle-solving skills, and thus everyone felt like they had a stake in the outcome.
We might understand this dispute in terms of the distinction between Pierre Lévy’s notion of collective intelligence and what Peter Walsh has described as “the expert paradigm.”16 Walsh argues that our traditional assumptions about expertise are breaking down or at least being transformed by the more open-ended processes of communication in cyberspace. The expert paradigm requires a bounded body of knowledge, which an individual can master. The types of questions that thrive in a collective intelligence, however, are open ended and profoundly interdisciplinary; they slip and slide across borders and draw on the combined knowledge of a more diverse community. As Lévy notes, “In a situation in flux, official languages and rigid structures do nothing more than blur or mask reality.”17
This may be one reason why spoiling is so popular among college students; it allows them to exercise their growing competencies in a space where there are not yet prescribed experts and well-mapped disciplines. Shawn, for example, told me that he saw a strong connection between spoiling and the skills he was trying to cultivate as an undergraduate history major: “I like to dig. I like to look at primary source information. I like to find official manuscripts of an event. I like to find out who were the people there, what did they see. I want to hear it from them. That’s part of my love of spoiling. I like to dig to the bottom. I like it when people don’t just say, ‘here’s who gets booted—here you go,’ but elaborate a little bit about where they get their information.”
Second, Walsh argues that the expert paradigm creates an “exterior” and “interior”; there are some people who know things and others who don’t. A collective intelligence, on the other hand, assumes that each person has something to contribute, even if they will only be called upon on an ad hoc basis. Again, here’s Shawn: “The people work together, put their heads together, in the absence of one person with inside info. … There are little tips which accumulate often during the week before the show. The group of spoilers have to figure out which ones are credible and which ones are wishful thinking or outright false.” Someone might lurk for an extended period of time feeling like they have nothing significant to contribute, and then Survivor will locate in a part of the world where they have traveled extensively or a contestant may be identified in their local community, and suddenly they become central to the quest.
Third, the expert paradigm, Walsh argues, uses rules about how you access and process information, rules that are established through traditional disciplines. By contrast, the strength and weakness of a collective intelligence is that it is disorderly, undisciplined, and unruly. Just as knowledge gets called upon on an ad hoc basis, there are no fixed procedures for what you do with knowledge. Each participant applies their own rules, works the data through their own processes, some of which will be more convincing than others, but none of which are wrong at face value. Debates about the rules are part of the process.
Fourth, Walsh’s experts are credentialized; they have gone through some kind of ritual that designates them as having mastered a particular domain, often having to do with formal education. While participants in a collective intelligence often feel the need to demonstrate or document how they know what they know, this is not based on a hierarchical system, and knowledge that comes from real-life experience rather than formal education may be, if anything, more highly valued here. ChillOne and the other “sources” were reinserting themselves into the process as “experts” (albeit experts by virtue of their experiences rather than any formal certification), and this threatened the more open-ended and democratic principles upon which a collective intelligence operates.
What holds a collective intelligence together is not the possession of knowledge, which is relatively static, but the social process of acquiring knowledge, which is dynamic and participatory, continually testing and reaffirming the group’s social ties. Some said that having Chill-One tell them the final four before the season had really begun, before they had a chance to get to know these contestants and make their own predictions, was like having someone sneak into their house and unwrap all of their Christmas presents before they had a chance to shake and rattle them to try to guess what might be inside.
For many others, getting the information was all that mattered. As one explained, “I thought the name of the game was spoiling. … The fun is trying to find out how the boots go down by whatever means we can, isn’t it?” Many claimed that it intensified their pleasure—being in the know about the secret—and watching the really silly guesses the uninformed were making on the official CBS Web site, where Jenna and Matthew were way down in the pack of likely winners. Others argued that this advanced information shifted the way they watched the series: “If C1 has successfully spoiled this installment of Survivor, the fun part is trying to figure out how the hell it will happen! It is the detective in us that not only wants to know what will happen, when it will happen, and how and why it happens.” ChillOne, they argued, had given them a new game to play just as they had started to tire of the old one, and, as such, they predicted he would be a “shot of adrenaline” for the whole spoiler community, keeping the franchise fresh and new for another season or two.
The
