The word spoiling goes way back—or at least as far back as you can go—in the history of the Internet. Spoiling emerged from the mismatch between the temporalities and geographies of old and new media. For starters, people on the East Coast saw a series three hours earlier than people on the West Coast. Syndicated series played on different nights of the week in different markets. American series played in the United States six months or more before they broke in international markets. As long as people in different locations weren’t talking to each other, each got a first-time experience. But, once fans got online, these differences in time zones loomed large. Someone on the East Coast would go online and post everything about an episode, and someone in California would get annoyed because the episode was “spoiled.” So, posters began putting the word “spoiler” in the subject line, so people could make up their own minds whether or not to read it.
Over time, though, the fan community turned spoiling into a game to find out what they could before the episodes even aired. Again, it is interesting to think about this in terms of temporality. Most viewers experience Survivor as something that unfolds week by week in real time. The show is edited to emphasize immediacy and spontaneity. The contestants don’t appear publicly until after they are booted, and often they speak as if the events hadn’t already happened. They can only speak concretely about things that have already been aired and seem at times to speculate about what is yet to come. Spoilers, on the other hand, work from the knowledge that the series has already been shot. As one fan explains, “The results were determined months ago and here we wait for the official results. And a few people out there who participated know the results and they are supposed to keep it under lock. Hahahahahaha!”
They are searching for signs of the aftermath, trying to find out which contestants lost the most weight (thus indicating that they spent more time surviving in the wilds) or which came back with full beards or bandaged hands; they seek leaks who are willing to give them some “small hints” about what took place, and then they pool their information, adding up all of the “small hints” into the “Big Picture.” Ghandia Johnson (Survivor: Thailand) thought she was smarter than the fan boards; she would post what she thought were tantalizing tidbits nobody could figure out. It turned out that the community—at least as an aggregate—was a whole lot smarter than she was and could use her “hints” to put together much of what was going to happen on the series. More recently, a news crew interviewed a Survivor producer in front of a white board that outlined the challenges for the forthcoming season; the fans were able to do a “frame grab” of the image, blow it up, and decipher the entire outline, giving them a road map for what was to come.
On one level, the story of Survivor: Amazon was done before Chill-One arrived on the scene; his sources at the Ariau Amazon Hotel were already starting to forget what had happened. On another level, the story hadn’t begun, since the cast hadn’t been publicly announced, the show was still being edited, and the episodes wouldn’t air for several more weeks when he made his first post at Survivor Sucks (http://p085.ezboard.com/bsurvivorsucks).
ChillOne knew he had some hot inside information and so he went where the hard-core fans hung out—Survivor Sucks, one of the oldest and most popular of the many discussion lists devoted to the series. The name bears some explanation, since clearly these people are dedicated fans who don’t really think the show sucks. Initially, Survivor Sucks was a forum for “recaps,” snarky summaries of the episodes. On the one hand, a recap is a useful tool for people who missed an episode. On the other hand, the recapping process was shaped by the desire to talk back to the television set, to make fun of formulas and signal your emotional distance from what’s taking place on the screen. Somewhere along the way, the Sucksters discovered “spoiling,” and the boards haven’t been the same since. So, it was here—to these people who pretended to hate Survivor but were pretty much obsessed with it—that ChillOne brought his information.
Anticipating some reaction, he started his own thread, “ChillOne’s Amazon Vacation Spoilers.” Surely, even ChillOne never imagined that the full thread would run for more than three thousand posts and continue across the full season. ChillOne made his first post at 7:13:25 P.M. on January 9, 2003. By 7:16:40 P.M. he was already facing questions. It wasn’t until 7:49:43 P.M. that someone implied that he might be connected to the show. A few minutes later, someone asked whether this might be a hoax.
It began innocently enough: “I have just returned from Brazil and a trip to the Amazon. … I will begin by saying that I do not have all the answers, or all the information about S6 [Survivor 6], but I have enough credible, spoiler type, information that I’d be open to sharing.”8
Images from Space
We would learn later that ChillOne had gone on vacation with a bunch of friends to Rio to celebrate the New Year but had wanted to see more of the country. He made his way to the Amazon and then learned that the Ariau Amazon Towers had been the headquarters for the Survivor production staff, and as a fan of the series he wanted to see the locations firsthand. He wasn’t a spoiler; he mostly asked questions of the hotel staff trying to figure out what might be meaningful sites on a Survivor-themed tour of the Amazon. Whereas most of the people who came there were eco-tourists who wanted to see nature untouched by human presence, he was a tele-tourist trying to visit a location made meaningful because it was transmitted by television.
His first post focused primarily around the shooting location: “First off, the map posted by Wezzie is very accurate. Let me start by filling in some of the gaps.” This was a bold opening move, as “Wezzie” is one of the most respected members of the Survivor spoiling community. She and her partner, Dan Bollinger, have specialized in location spoiling. Offline, Wezzie is a substitute teacher, an arboretum docent, a travel agent, and a freelance writer. Dan is an industrial designer who runs a factory that makes refrigerator magnets. They live halfway across the country from each other, but they work as a team to try to identify and document the next Survivor location—what Mark Burnett calls “the seventeenth character”—and to learn as much as they can about the area. As a team, Wezzie and Dan have been able to pinpoint the series location with astonishing accuracy. The process may start with a throwaway comment from Mark Burnett or a tip from “somebody who knows somebody, who knows somebody, who works for CBS or a tourist company.”9 Wezzie and Dan have built up contacts with travel agencies, government officials, film bureaus, tourism directors, and resort operators. As Dan notes, “Word gets around the tourism industry very quickly about a large project that will be bringing in millions of American dollars.”
Flashback to Twin Peaks
My first introduction to the Internet, and to online fan communities, came in 1991 through alt.tv.twinpeaks.1 Looking back, it is remarkable how much the discussion around the series was already starting to resemble one of Pierre Lévy’s knowledge communities. The group emerged within just a few weeks after the first episode of David Lynch’s quirky detective series aired and rapidly became one of the largest and most active discussion lists in the early Internet era, attracting by some estimates 25,000 readers (although a substantially smaller number of posters). The discussion group served many functions for its participants. Fans worked together to compile charts showing all of the series events or compilations of important bits of dialogue; they shared what they could find about the series in local papers; they used the Internet to locate tapes if they missed episodes; they traced through the complex grid of references to other films, television series, songs, novels, and other popular texts, matching wits with what they saw as a trickster author always trying to throw them off his trail. But, more than anything else, the list functioned as a space where people could pull together the clues and vet their speculations concerning the central narrative hook—who killed Laura Palmer? The pressure on the group mounted as the moment of dramatic revelation approached: “Break the code, solve the crime. We’ve only got four days left.” In many ways, Twin Peaks was the perfect text for a computer-based community, combining the narrative complexity of a mystery with the complex character relationships