Convergence Culture. Henry Jenkins

that past history means *a lot* but how many times have we received legit contestant spoilers like this from somebody that just happened to be around where filming took place. I guess there’s a first time for everything.

      It is, of course, still possible that ChillOne is MB and that he is establishing credibility by leaking good information a few days early only to slam us with a bad F4 prediction.

      MB is definitely the type of person that would have his lackeys make up fake spoilers and such during their lunch breaks.

      They would continue in that manner for the rest of the season. Spoiling is an adversarial process—a contest between the fans and the producers, one group trying to get their hands on the knowledge the other is trying to protect. Spoiling is also adversarial in the same sense that a court of law is adversarial, committed to the belief that through a contest over information, some ultimate truth will emerge. The system works best when people are contesting every claim that gets made, taking nothing at face value. As one skeptic explained, “People with doubt should be welcomed, not scorned. It helps everyone in the long run. If I poke at holes that look thin, they either get firmed up (a win for you), or they become bigger holes (a win for me). Bigger holes could lead to other things. Either way, some resolution is forthcoming eventually.” As participants struggle over the nature of the truth, things can get pretty nasty.

      If enough contradicting evidence could be found to fully discredit ChillOne, the discussion list would be able to close off his thread and attention would be routed elsewhere. ChillOne wanted very much to keep his thread alive for the whole season; his rivals wanted to shut him down. There were the two camps in this struggle over ChillOne’s claims. First, there were the absolutists, who believed that if any part of the ChillOne intel was false, it proved that he was lying: “If a person says four distinct things are going to happen and then the first one doesn’t, that means he’s wrong. Whether anything is right after that is irrelevant. … You can’t ‘partly’ win. You either nail it or you don’t. … [Otherwise], that person merely met the mathematical probability of being correct.” And then there were the relativists, who argued that memory could be imprecise or that data could be corrupted: “Where do we get you people from? … People unable or unwilling to acknowledge any correctness in some elements, if there is incorrectness in any other elements.” There was too much information here that came close to the facts for the whole thing to be fabricated.

      Soon, the absolutists and the relativists were enmeshed in philosophical debates about the nature of truth. Think of such debates as exercises in popular epistemology. As we learn how to live within a knowledge culture, we can anticipate many such discussions centering as much on how we know and how we evaluate what we know as on the information itself. Ways of knowing may be as distinctive and personal as what kinds of knowledge we access, but as knowing becomes public, as knowing becomes part of the life of a community, those contradictions in approach must be worked over if not worked through.

      At one point an exasperated ChillOne defender summed up the competing theories: “He was never in Brazil. He works for someone in the know. He’s not quite right, he’s working the perfect scam, he’s one of us that got amazingly lucky.” The poster continued, “To me, a spoiler as grand as this one opens the author to legitimate questions about his identity, his true sources of information, his true purpose, and so on. In other words, the author himself becomes a critical part of the spoiling information.” Part of what gave ChillOne credibility was his willingness to log in day after day and face these questions, respond calmly and rationally, and maintain consistency about what he was saying. Others, however, noted strange shifts in his writing style, sometimes lucid and authoritative, other times vague, rambling, and incoherent, as if someone was ghostwriting some of his posts.

      Early on, ChillOne’s credibility took a licking. The “Asian American” (Daniel) wasn’t the first one booted, as “Uncle Boatman” had predicted, and so everyone was ready to bury the theory until Daniel went the third week, pretty much according to the logic that ChillOne had outlined. And so it went, week by nail-biting week, with ChillOne’s information proving to be more or less right, but each week something contradicted his claims. He gained some credibility by midseason when the news media picked up the story of a Las Vegas gambling operation that discontinued betting on the Survivor outcomes when it caught some CBS employees placing bets on what they suspected might be insider information. They had been gambling on Matthew and Jenna for the final two, and this seemed to prove ChillOne knew his stuff, until people realized that someone from CBS might have been monitoring the boards and had been betting that ChillOne was right. It had happened before when the spoiling community had trusted some consistently accurate predictions from a Boston newspaper as backing up their inside information on Survivor: The Australian Outback until it was clear that the reporter was just writing his column based on stuff he learned from the online discussions.

      In the end, ChillOne got it right, assuming Jenna was “Jana” and the thirty-something shaggy-haired Matthew was the twenty-something man with the “close haircut.” Maybe it would be more accurate to say that ChillOne’s intel helped the spoilers get within striking distance of the right answer, even if many Sucksters trusted their guts over his inside dope: they couldn’t believe that Jenna, the spoiled brat, could win out over the hardworking but mysterious Matthew. For a community like this one, which thrives on debates about the validity of information, a loose consensus is about all one can expect at the present time. Some things become common beliefs that everyone accepts, and on other matters, the group, gladly and gleefully, agrees to disagree.

      The Evil Pecker and His Minions

      We may never know for sure where ChillOne’s information came from. From the start, the skeptics had two prevailing theories: that he was in some way linked to the production company, or that he was a hoaxer. Both of these theories were plausible, given their experiences over the previous seasons.

      The spoilers had every reason to believe that Mark Burnett played an active role in shaping the flow of information around the series. They called him “Evil Pecker Mark,” a play on EP (which also stands for “Executive Producer”). CBS had admitted that they, like many other production companies, monitored the discussion lists for information about the audience. Here’s Chris Ender, CBS senior VP of communications: “In the first season, there was a ground swell of attention in there. We started monitoring the message boards to actually help guide us in what would resonate in our marketing. It’s just the best marketing research you can get.”¹¹ The fans had every reason to believe that someone from Burnett’s office was listening to what they were saying—and some reason to believe that they were being lied to, at least some of the time, in a deliberate effort to shape the reception of the series. Here’s host Jeff Probst describing his role in this process: “We have so many lies going, and we have so much misinformation that there is usually an out; there is usually a way to recover [from a slip]. I can tell you who the winner is right now and you wouldn’t know whether to believe me or not.”¹²

      First-season fans started scrutinizing the opening credits for clues and spotted an image of nine contestants at what looked like a tribal council session.¹³ They used that image to narrow down the boot order—though in some cases, questions remained, since it was possible one person was voting when the picture was taken and some of the people were in the shadows, leading to debates about who they really were. The picture turned out to be misleading, read out of context. No one was sure whether the producer meant to send them on a wild-goose chase. Later in the first season, the behind-the-scenes machinations of the show’s producers made the national news in what became known as “Gervase X.” Spoilers figured out the URL for the directory tree on the official CBS Web site and dug around behind the scenes, unearthing fifteen unlinked images showing all but one of the contestants, Gervase, Xed out. The fans were convinced that the African American coach was the only one who never got booted, up until the moment that Gervase got voted off the island. Both Mark Burnett and Ghen Maynard, the CBS executive in charge of reality programming, have publicly acknowledged that they planted that misleading clue. From then on, the rules of the game had changed. Shawn summarized the shift of attitude: “Before it was Mark Burnett that naïve unassuming producer/idiot letting all of his secrets flood out. Now it was Mark Burnett deceiver, Mark Burnett the Devil,