Convergence Culture. Henry Jenkins
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 further, seeking to alter the outcome of events in the house by breaking through the wall of silence that separated 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,