all time. For others, he was a villain, the guy who destroyed the game for everyone else.
As we have seen, the age of media convergence enables communal, rather than individualistic, modes of reception. Not every media consumer interacts within a virtual community yet; some simply discuss what they see with their friends, family members, and workmates. But few watch television in total silence and isolation. For most of us, television provides fodder for so-called water cooler conversations. And, for a growing number of people, the water cooler has gone digital. Online forums offer an opportunity for participants to share their knowledge and opinions. In this chapter I hope to bring readers inside the spoiling community to learn more about how it works and how it impacts the reception of a popular television series.
My focus here is on the process and ethics of shared problem-solving in an online community. I am less interested, ultimately, in who ChillOne is or whether his information was accurate than I am with how the community responded to, evaluated, debated, critiqued, and came to grips with the kinds of knowledge he brought to them. I am interested in how the community reacts to a shift in its normal ways of processing and evaluating knowledge. It is at moments of crisis, conflict, and controversy that communities are forced to articulate the principles that guide them.2
Spoiling as Collective Intelligence
On the Internet, Pierre Lévy argues, people harness their individual expertise toward shared goals and objectives: “No one knows everything, everyone knows something, all knowledge resides in humanity.”3 Collective intelligence refers to this ability of virtual communities to leverage the combined expertise of their members. What we cannot know or do on our own, we may now be able to do collectively. And this organization of audiences into what Lévy calls knowledge communities allows them to exert a greater aggregate power in their negotiations with media producers. The emergent knowledge culture will never fully escape the influence of commodity culture, any more than commodity culture can totally function outside the constraints of the nation-state. He suggests, however, that collective intelligence will gradually alter the ways commodity culture operates. Lévy sees industry panic over audience participation as shortsighted: “By preventing the knowledge culture from becoming autonomous, they deprive the circuits of commodity space … of an extraordinary source of energy.”4 The knowledge culture, he suggests, serves as the “invisible and intangible engine” for the circulation and exchange of commodities.
The new knowledge culture has arisen as our ties to older forms of social community are breaking down, our rooting in physical geography is diminished, our bonds to the extended and even the nuclear family are disintegrating, and our allegiances to nation-states are being redefined. New forms of community are emerging, however: these new communities are defined through voluntary, temporary, and tactical affiliations, reaffirmed through common intellectual enterprises and emotional investments. Members may shift from one group to another as their interests and needs change, and they may belong to more than one community at the same time. These communities, however, are held together through the mutual production and reciprocal exchange of knowledge. As Levy writes, such groups “make available to the collective intellect all of the pertinent knowledge available to it at a given moment.” More importantly, they serve as sites for “collective discussion, negotiation, and development,” and they prod the individual members to seek out new information for the common good: “Unanswered questions will create tension … indicating regions where invention and innovation are required.”5
Lévy draws a distinction between shared knowledge, information that is believed to be true and held in common by the entire group, and collective intelligence, the sum total of information held individually by the members of the group that can be accessed in response to a specific question. He explains: “The knowledge of a thinking community is no longer a shared knowledge for it is now impossible for a single human being, or even a group of people, to master all knowledge, all skills. It is fundamentally collective knowledge, impossible to gather together into a single creature.”6 Only certain things are known by all—the things the community needs to sustain its existence and fulfill its goals. Everything else is known by individuals who are on call to share what they know when the occasion arises. But communities must closely scrutinize any information that is going to become part of their shared knowledge, since misinformation can lead to more and more misconceptions as any new insight is read against what the group believes to be core knowledge.
Survivor spoiling is collective intelligence in practice.
Each fan I spoke with had their own history of how they became a spoiler. Shawn was a history major who loved the process of investigation and the challenge of weighing different accounts of a past event. Wezzie was a part-time travel agent who became fascinated with the faraway locations and the exotic people represented on the series. As for ChillOne, who knows, but it would seem from the outside to have to do with the ability to make the world pay attention to him.
Survivor asks us to speculate about what happened. It practically demands our predictions. Media scholar Mary Beth Haralovich and mathematician Michael W. Trosset describe the role chance plays in shaping outcomes: “Narrative pleasure stems from the desire to know what will happen next, to have that gap opened and closed, again and again, until the resolution of the story. … In Survivor, unpredictability whets the desire to know what happens next, but how that gap will be closed is grounded in uncertainty due to chance. … In its invitation to prediction, Survivor is more like a horse race than fiction.”7 At the same time, for those viewers who are most aware of the production circumstances, there is also an “uncertainty due to ignorance,” which is what galls these fans the most. Someone out there—Mark Burnett for one—knows something they don’t. They want to know what can be known. And that’s part of what makes spoiling Survivor such a compelling activity. The ability to expand your individual grasp by pooling knowledge with others intensifies the pleasures any viewer takes in trying to “expect the unexpected,” as the program’s ad campaign urges.
And, so, Survivor’s spoilers gather and process information. As they do so, they form a knowledge community. We are experimenting with new kinds of knowledge that emerge in cyberspace. Out of such play, Pierre Lévy believes, new kinds of political power will emerge which will operate alongside and sometimes directly challenge the hegemony of the nation-state or the economic might of corporate capitalism. Lévy sees such knowledge communities as central to the task of restoring democratic citizenship. At his most optimistic, he sees the sharing of knowledge around the world as the best way of breaking down the divisions and suspicions that currently shape international relations. Lévy’s claims are vast and mystifying; he speaks of his model of collective intelligence as an “achievable utopia,” yet he recognizes that small local experiments will be where we learn how to live within knowledge communities. We are, he argues, in a period of “apprenticeship” through which we innovate and explore the structures that will support political and economic life in the future.
Imagine the kinds of information these fans could collect, if they sought to spoil the government rather than the networks. Later, we will look at the roles collective intelligence played in the 2004 presidential campaign, and we will see signs that players of alternate reality games are beginning to focus their energies toward solving civic and political problems. Having said that, I don’t want to seem to endorse a very old idea that fandom is a waste of time because it redirects energies that could be spent toward “serious things” like politics into more trivial pursuits. Quite the opposite, I would argue that one reason more Americans do not participate in public debates is that our normal ways of thinking and talking about politics require us to buy into what we will discuss later in this chapter as the expert paradigm: to play the game, you have to become a policy wonk, or, more accurately, you have to let a policy wonk do your thinking for you. One reason why spoiling is a more compelling practice is because the way knowledge gets produced and evaluated is more democratic. Spoiling is empowering in the literal sense in that it helps participants to understand how they may deploy the new kinds of power that are emerging from participation within knowledge communities. For the moment, though, the spoilers are just having fun on a Friday night participating in an elaborate scavenger hunt involving thousands of participants who all interact in a global village. Play is one of the ways