Convergence Culture. Henry Jenkins
had the last laugh in that first season. There was a really big clue in the opening credit: as the announcer is explaining that “only one will remain to win the title of sole survivor and one million dollars … in cash,” he had shown, from the first episode forward, a shot of Richard Hatch, the actual winner, walking alone across a rope bridge with a big smile on his face. The spoilers had seen it and dismissed it, believing it couldn’t be that simple—and after that, it wasn’t.
From then on, the spoilers watched the episodes more closely, using their single frame advance to search for embedded clues, keeping track of the shots of animals that often functioned metaphorically to foreshadow the rising or falling fortunes of individuals or teams, looking at editing patterns to see which characters were being foregrounded and which hidden. Tapewatcher developed an intriguing theory about Survivor: Africa based on what he saw as biblical allusions surrounding the long-haired, bearded, and Jewish Ethan, who he believed was going to win out over his more transgressive competitors. Again and again, Ethan’s image was coupled with a distinctive lens flair that looked a bit like the Star of David. “Follow the star,” and you will find the winner, Tapewatcher predicted, and, strange as it seems, he was right. Tapewatcher presented his argument in page after page of richly detailed close textual analysis, accompanied in some cases by images grabbed off the video tape and in some cases by actual streaming footage.15 Is it possible that the show’s editors planted clues for viewers? This may not be as far-fetched as it sounds. Another reality series, The Mole, planted equally obscure clues that it assumed people armed with VCRs and the Internet would sort through. A good chunk of the final episode of each season was spent mapping them out for viewers “too dense” to spot them hidden in the background of shots or arranged in the first letters of the last names of the production crew on the closing credits.
As soon as the Survivor fans found an editing pattern that might help them foretell a winner, Burnett shifted his style for the next season. There were even rumors, never confirmed or denied, that once a guess circulated broadly, the production staff reedited subsequent episodes to strip out elements they knew the spoiler community was looking for. After all, the late episodes were still being cut as the early ones aired. Burnett liked to talk about Survivor as a psychological experiment to see how people would react under extreme circumstances. Was he also playing an experiment with his audience to watch how an information society would respond to misdirection?
By the sixth season, there was a growing sense that Burnett was losing interest in the spoilers, much as a segment of the audience was losing interest in the series. As one fan grumbled, “I want CBS to play the game. They are not playing the game.” If ChillOne was telling the truth, then security on the Survivor production site was getting unforgivably sloppy. Or, more optimistically, the fans would have pulled off a coup for which the series might never recover. As one fan exclaimed, “Picture what a fine panic such a thing might cause!”
If ChillOne was lying, if ChillOne was a plant or, even better, if Burnett himself was going undercover on the boards, that would be the producer’s biggest stunt ever. One Suckster explained: “CBS would never allow accidental information to come into the hand of a lay person. They are smart enough to hide it. Say what you will but there IS a direct connection between Chill and CBS.” Others 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,