Jenkins' Gated Communities (Chapter 1)

The heart of the first chapter of Henry Jenkins' Convergence Culture is the idea of "spoiling." A practice founded simply in the "mismatch between temporalities and geographies of old and new media" (Jenkins 30), spoiling developed from an East coast-to-West coast share of information to a game in which fans began to investigate shows in order to find out what they can before episodes even aired. The online communities that delved into the task of spoiling provided a prime example of what Jenkins and Pierre Lévy refer to as "collective intelligence," or the "ability of virtual communities to leverage the combined expertise of their members" (Jenkins 27). Jenkins goes on to introduce what Lévy presents as knowledge communities, a term used to identify these groups where members' knowledge is aggregated and used to produce or discover. Throughout the introduction of the idea of collective intelligence and knowledge communities – and Survivor spoiling as a prime example of these concepts – the notion of a participatory democracy in knowledge creation is stressed above all. Lévy even states that "it is now impossible for a single human being, or even a group of people, to master all knowledge," (Jenkins 28) which suggests that above all else, the open flow of information and the freedom with which members of the community can submit their thoughts is of paramount importance.

In spite of the power of the idea of such open knowledge communities, the sobering reality is that Lévy's utopian scenario of "the whole world operating as a single knowledge culture" (Jenkins 38) seems to be almost impossible to approach in practice. The largest obstacle to forming such open communities has proven to be "brain trusts," which ultimately create what Jenkins refers to as "gated [knowledge] communities" (Jenkins 38). The hierarchy Lévy distrusts so heavily is reinstated within these collective knowledge communities when privatization occurs: sources are kept secret, coveted information is kept under wraps, membership is invitation only after extensive vetting, and any person or group that even approached the brain trust's resources is seen as a threat. The focus of Jenkins' Survivor example was the spoiling work done by ChillOne, a legendary spoiler that gained privileged information and slowly revealed it to a rabid online spoiling community; the brain trust of this community spent the majority of its efforts working to disprove ChillOne's revelations, rather than work to explore with the rest of the community the possibilities of their truth.

While proponents "argue that these brain trusts serve a useful purpose" (Jenkins 39) in guaranteeing the validity and quality of information, it seems as though their first aim is self-preservation, rather than helping the knowledge community. Lévy's ideal hierarchy-destroying, globally-scaled knowledge communities may remain simply a thing of fiction, so long as the privileged brain trusts sit on their information in the name of self-preservation; one knowledge community member – outside of the brain trust – feels as though "[everything] we have is also theirs because we're open, everything they have most definitely is not ours because members of the gated communities may or may not feel like dropping in and sharing it" (Jenkins 39). With this much secrecy and distrust between the general knowledge community and the gated elite, the power of collective intelligence may never reach its potential.