The Collective

Henry Jenkins’s essay “Spoiling Survivor” discusses the ability of the Internet to create “knowledge communities” in which many people from across the world can contribute to a single common set of information. The Internet provides the perfect opportunity to expand every participant’s knowledge, but Jenkins analyzes some of the social dynamics in a message board called “Survivor Sucks” that result in an uneven distribution of wealth.

The “Survivor Sucks” message board, despite its name, is home to fans of the Survivor television show. These fans have made a game out of learning all they can about the show, and they take pride in finding information out – spoilers – before an episode even airs. Forum members have even gone so far as to use imaging satellites to take photographs of possible filming locations and perform background checks on possible contestants. Because obtaining such information requires specific skills and connections, very few forum members have access to first-hand knowledge of the spoilers. This leads to the formation of a “gated knowledge community”, in which a few members obtain information and vet it before releasing it to the rest of the community. Ostensibly, this is because they don’t want to release information that might be too private, but it’s easy to see that human nature might also play a role.

Egotism in human nature often leads to problems with “knowledge communities” online when members begin to hide information from other members. In this way, information is not as distributed as it might be. This happened to the Survivor Sucks community when a new member, ChillOne, came onto the scene after claiming to have stayed at a hotel near the filming of Survivor: Amazon. His appearance in the Survivor Sucks community revealed very little information but promised that there was much more he knew. Traditional offline social dynamics suddenly disturbed the seemingly utopian community. The previous guardians of information were now overshadowed by someone who claimed to know orders of magnitude more information about the contest. Suddenly, the community’s very existence was unnecessary: their previous collaboration was unnecessary when someone could blow open the whole case. The whole purpose of the community changed; where they had previously tried to find out information about Survivor, now they solely tried to prove or disprove ChillOne’s information.

Knowledge communities succeed on the Internet when the members are each able to contribute approximately equal amounts of information. This is why the core Linux kernel, for instance, is developed by a relatively small number of coders. A minimum amount of knowledge and skills serve as a barried to entry to the knowledge community. People lacking the requisite skills aren’t accepted in the community and have trouble understanding what is happening.

Wikipedia is another example of a knowledge community. Wikipedia has succeeded because articles can evolve through individually small but collectively important contributions. Wikipedia is, perhaps, a knowledge community to end all knowledge communities. They aim to collect all information about anything important in the world, past or present. Because their knowledge spans such a diverse field, it is essentially impossible for one user to come in with a somewhat complete set of knowledge in the way ChillOne did. Thus, Wikipedia stands to succeed where Survivor Sucks failed.