Convergence Is Reality

Who would have anticipated that reality television would turn out to be the killer app of media convergence?

By Henry Jenkins

June 6, 2003

Imagine Survivor as a giant cat and mouse game being played between producers and consumers.

The producers plant clues, foreshadow results, and offer hints in interviews, trying to create enormous public interest they can harvest for their advertisers. Week by week, the eagerly anticipated results are fodder for water cooler discussions and get reported as news-even on rival networks.

The Survivor winner is one of the most tightly guarded secrets in the country. Some say that the show's producer, Mark Burnett, engages in misinformation campaigns, planting misleading information in the coding of its Web sites trying to throw smoke in viewers' eyes. Contestants and crew face enormous fines if they get caught spilling the beans.

The audience ranks among one of the largest in broadcast television-and it is hellbent on ferreting out the results. The most hardcore fans, a contingent known as the "spoilers," go to extraordinary lengths. They use satellite photographs to locate the base camp. They form teams that try to surmise the identities of the contestants before they are officially announced. Someone posts a message reporting that the guy in a neighboring cubicle has disappeared for two months without explanation and returned thinner, tan, and scratching insect bites like crazy. These spoilers spread out across the Web, seeking every bit of information they can find on the suspect (and given how little privacy remains, they can find a lot). They watch the taped episodes, frame by frame, looking for hidden information. They know Survivor backwards and forwards, and they are determined to figure it out-together-before the producers reveal what happened.

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The French cyberspace theorist Pierre Levy has used the term "collective intelligence" to describe the massive-scale information gathering and processing activities that have emerged in Web communities. On the Internet, he argues, people harness their individual expertise toward shared goals and objectives: "No one knows everything, everyone knows something, all knowledge resides in humanity." Survivor spoiling is collective intelligence in action.

Into this intense competition enters ChillOne, a lurker who has never previously posted to a discussion list. On vacation in Brazil, he stumbles into a detailed account of who is going to get bumped from Survivor: Amazon and posts it on the Internet. To some, ChillOne is a hero, the best spoiler of all time. For others, he is a villain, the guy who destroyed the game for everyone else. These disappointed viewers, it turns out, were more invested in the hunt than in knowing the results. Either way, he has changed the rules forever.