know—or more precisely, whether each community member should be able to set the terms of how much they want to know and when they want to know it. Lévy speaks about knowledge communities in terms of their democratic operations; yet the ability for any member to dump information out there without regard to anyone else’s preferences holds a deeply totalitarian dimension. Historically, spoiler warnings had been a device to allow people to determine whether or not they wanted to know every bit of available information. ChillOne and his allies argued that such warnings were not needed here, since the whole purpose of the group was spoiling, and yet, telling the answers cut off the game that many other group members wanted to play. In any case, this argument assumes that the information ChillOne unearthed would stay within the spoiling community.
Increasingly, spoiled information is finding its way into more and more public discussion forums, where it is picked up by mainstream news outlets. New York Times’s reporter Emily Nussbaum wrote about this phenomenon as “the End of the Surprise Ending,” suggesting that this scurry to track down all available information and the accelerated circulation of that data across many different discussion lists was making it impossible for networks to keep secrets or for consumers to watch cult shows without knowing what is going to happen next. As she explains, “Shows are becoming more like books: If you want to know what happens later on, just peek at the last page. … It’s an odd wish—for control of the story, for the chance to minimize your risk of disappointment. With spoilers in hand, a viewer can watch the show with distance, analyzing like a critic instead of being immersed like a newbie. … But the price for that privilege is that you never really get to watch a show for the first time.”18 ChillOne’s critics would suggest that the problem extends beyond this: if you want to participate in the ongoing life of this community, you have to accept this knowledge whether you want it or not. Spoiling—at least within Survivor fandom—has now moved decisively from a game of puzzle-solving to one based on revelation of sourced information.
ChillOne stumbled onto his intel by accident; now the community was sending its own reporters. Since the Survivor: Amazon season, either ChillOne or someone else from the fan community had flown to the location while shooting was occurring and brought back a good deal of information about what took place. Two seasons later, a detailed list of all of the upcoming plot twists was dumped on Ain’t It Cool News, a Web site with a traffic many, many times larger than Survivor Sucks. From there, it got picked up by Entertainment Weekly and a range of other mainstream publications. (This list turned out to be largely false, but who can say what will happen next time?) Suddenly, it was not just members of the spoiling community who had to decide whether they wanted to log on and read what someone like ChillOne had found by visiting the series location. Suddenly, every viewer and every reader of every publication ran the risk of learning more than they wanted to know.
As spoiling has moved more and more into the public eye, it has moved from a fun game that Mark Burnett occasionally liked to play with a small segment of his audience to a serious threat to the relationship he wanted to construct with the mass audience of his series. As Burnett told an interviewer, “It [spoiling] is what it is as long as it doesn’t affect ratings. There may be 5000 people on the Internet but there are some 20 million viewers and they don’t spend their time reading the Internet.”19 In and of itself, spoiling represents an extension of the pleasures built into the series. The producers want us to guess what is going to happen next, even if they never imagined teams of several thousand people working together to solve this puzzle. In the next chapter, we will see how the desire to build a community around such programs is part of a corporate strategy to ensure viewer engagement with brands and franchises. Yet, pushed to its logical extreme, spoiling becomes dangerous to those same interests, and they have begun using legal threats to try to shut it down. At the start of the eighth season, Jeff Probst told a reporter for the Edmonton Sun, “The Internet and the accessibility to information have made it very difficult to do shows like Survivor. And it wouldn’t surprise me if ultimately it led to the demise of our show at some point. Sooner or later, you cannot combat people who betray you. We have a crew of 400 people, and everybody tells somebody something. I definitely believe that. Once you spread information like that and there’s money to be made or fame to be had—‘Hey, I know something you don’t know, listen to this’—all we can do, honestly, is counter it with our own misinformation.”20 And the producers are not the only ones angered by such efforts to track down information at the source. Wezzie, who has herself participated in on-location scouting, wrote to me,
Soon (On Sept 16), the next Survivor: Vanuatu premieres. But, the boards feel different this time around. … They’re D-E-A-D. I’ve kept a location-information thread going for the past few months with discussions about the environment and cultural traditions of Vanuatu and Dan put up some great maps, but that’s about all that has been happening on the boards. The Internet fans are bored, angry and disinterested. As a result of Chill-One’s (and Snewser of SurvivorNews) boot lists, Survivor’s most avid fans, the internet community, no longer seems interested in discussing the show. ‘Spoiler free’ boards and forums have sprung up but they are lightly visited. … Hopefully, interest will pick up once the show premieres. I wonder if CBS and SEG are happy that lethargy has set into the Internet community … or worried.”21
Earlier, I described these emerging knowledge cultures as defined through voluntary, temporary, and tactical affiliations. Because they are voluntary, people do not remain in communities that no longer meet their emotional or intellectual needs. Because they are temporary, these communities form and disband with relative flexibility. Because they are tactical, they tend not to last beyond the tasks that set them in motion. Sometimes, such communities can redefine their purpose. Insofar as being a fan is a lifestyle, fans may shift between one series and another many times in the history of their affiliation. Yet, as a fan community disbands, its members may move in many different directions, seeking out new spaces to apply their skills and new openings for their speculations, and in the process those skills spread to new communities and get applied to new tasks. ChillOne’s intervention no doubt shortened the life of the Survivor spoiling community, yet he merely sped up what was going to be an inevitable decline in interest. Once the game had been played through a few times, the members were going to seek out new avenues for their practice.
We can see such knowledge communities as central to the process of grassroots convergence. To be sure, as we will see in the next chapter, the producers wanted to direct traffic from the television show to the Web and other points of entry into the franchise. Those various points of contact became opportunities to promote both the series and its sponsors. Yet, fans also exploited convergence to create their own points of contact. They were looking for ways to prolong their pleasurable engagement with a favorite program, and they were drawn toward the collaborative production and evaluation of knowledge. This bottom-up process potentially generated greater interest in the series, amplifying these fans’ investment in the aired material. But, insofar as it interfered with or reshaped the informational economy around a series, it also threatened the producer’s ability to control public response.
What we need to keep in mind here and throughout the book is that the interests of producers and consumers are not the same. Sometimes they overlap. Sometimes they conflict. The communities that on one level are the producer’s best allies on another level may be their worst enemies. In the next chapter, we will reverse perspectives—looking at the audiences of reality television from the vantage point of program producers and advertisers. In this way, we will come to understand how entertainment companies are reappraising the economic value of fan participation.
1 For a fuller discussion of Twin Peaks’ online fan community, see Henry Jenkins, “‘Do You Enjoy Making the Rest of Us Feel Stupid?’: alt.tv.twinpeaks, the Trickster Author, and Viewer Mastery,” in Fans, Gamers, and Bloggers: Exploring Participatory Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2006).
1 Personal interview with author, May 2003.
2 Chris Wright, “Poaching Reality:
