First World Risks in the 21st Century: Spoilers!

When I was growing up in Sydney during the 1970s and 1980s, the pattern was this: my friends and I would watch our favourite shows on the telly, or go see a film (usually together in a rowdy group, sometimes with a date…), or *gasp* read a book. We would then talk about it, either at school the next day or in those endless phone calls teenagers seem to be particularly good at.

I discovered fandom in my early teenage years and as such I had a pretty active pen pal list, first with Doctor Who fans around Australia and in the UK, and then with V fans in the USA, Canada and Puerto Rico. There was time lag in the letter writing game, and also with when TV shows were broadcast, films released and books published. Somehow, we coped.

TV was watched when it was on. Twenty years ago, that was self-evident, but now it’s not so much. My family bought a VCR back in the 1980s, but we didn’t have many blank videotapes and the timing mechanism was something I can’t remember using. Perhaps it wasn’t there in our first machine. Renting movies was great, but buying them out of the question. And we still had to wait for the British release of any books to make it out to their former colonies… unless a certain bookstore in Sydney managed to beat Australian Customs and get some US releases on the shelves.

Fact was, the concept of “spoilers” was non-existent. It’s only looking back now just how much that was the case. Despite being a fan hooked into fandom at the time, I had no idea about the adversaries in Doctor Who’s "Earthshock", nor the fate of one of the regular characters. I also had no idea about the ending of Blake’s 7, even though my friends and I knew it was the last episode. I experienced both those things, and many more besides, as intended. My memories of those stories are bound up in the emotional experience I had as a kid when I first saw them. Post-viewing discussions in the school yard or on the phone helped cement those experiences, felt through the mad cocktail shake of hormones. If you missed an episode, you missed it. In those days, the concept of catching up with a repeat, or a video release of a TV show, just wasn’t there. Before our VCR arrived, it was years before I saw some episodes of Doctor Who, and my experience of them was a mixture of listening to an audio recording, talking to friends who had seen it, and reading reviews and synopses, then the novelisations.

The increasing prevalence of VCRs, and broadcasting politics, changed things in slow time. Some people were able to get videotapes of TV shows from overseas and small groups started to watch them together. Previews started to appear in fanzines. There was still a time lag, but I don’t remember any protests about advance news spoiling the stories. My memories are of being hungry to know what was going to happen… But maybe there were those who didn’t want to know. They didn’t let the fanzine editors know; maybe they just didn’t read the previews, which were clearly headlined as such.

The internet and illegal downloads changed all that through speed and accessibility.

My Masters was all about how audiences interact with TV, specifically Doctor Who. I did the bulk of my research during the latter years of the 1990s, when the internet was starting to become a household thing. No longer the domain solely of geeks, but ordinary people being able to access the Web. I completed my thesis in 2000; broadband had yet to replace dial-up access in any major way. A decade on, most first world homes have broadband access, and the power of computers now as I write this blog were unimaginable ten years ago. Watch a full length TV episode on my computer? Pure science fiction then, but now I have a legally purchased copy of the original V miniseries on my phone.

The technology has driven change in the way we watch, listen and read things, but the etiquette connected to the social interaction generated by how we watch, listen and read things is still being developed. It’s happening, and it’s happening in a patchy way, which is to be expected. Some spaces online have established the rules, and happily act to ensure those rules are followed. It’s not perfect. The ability to be anonymous online means there are those who feel safe in playing their games to get a reaction. Trolls are a well-known phenomenon in chat rooms and on discussion boards, and in the comments in blogs. It’s one of the reasons for being able to moderate comments and online discussions.

I don’t know when the term “spoiler” emerged to mean what it does now. It’s not yet in the Oxford English Dictionary in the context of “broadcasting” a fact that ruins the surprise in a movie, TV show or book. By “broadcast”, I mean including the fact in a subject line of an email sent to a mailing list, or in a post to a newsgroup, a Facebook status update, a tweet on Twitter… I love how the word “spoiler” has become a catch-phrase of River Song in Doctor Who.

TV, films and books have employed twists and suspense as part of their hook to get and keep interest. If people know the big reveal, what’s the point in watching or reading? Soaps rely on that concept, as do thrillers. Most fiction does. This doesn’t explain the pleasure many people have in re-watching and re-reading things, but that’s a different type of enjoyment, and not affected by the subject of this piece. I always think of the Buffy The Vampire Slayer episode “I Was Made to Love You” as the perfect example of what I mean. It’s a rather daft episode, until the Big Thing happens, which makes it amazing TV. I was lucky in that I avoided any knowledge of the Big Thing; I don’t like watching that episode in re-watching the series because I know what’s coming and the rest of the episode is just not really very good. Because I know what’s coming, the emotional engagement is no longer there.

There are degrees of spoiler, and at this stage I think reaction is subjective. I know some people who become hermits to avoid news of casting decisions published in the media generally; I know others who will not watch the trailers for what’s coming next week. I have some sympathy for the latter because some trailers I’ve seen have been pretty poor and have given away surprises. Generally, though, I am pretty happy to accept that what’s put out there in the world by the producers is deliberate and thus won’t affect my enjoyment negatively. I do get annoyed, though, by people outside of the production process who announce surprises publicly.

I’ll share a recent example. This week I watched [Spooks] as it aired on BBC1. I was also following Twitter and Facebook on Tweetdeck. A surprise occurred. I tweeted my delight: “Oh. My. #spooks”. Someone else revealed the surprise, in caps, no less, with the hashtag, in such a way as to be available to anyone reading Twitter. I chided the Tweeter, gently but pointedly, and they protested, saying it was fair game to tweet what they’d tweeted during broadcast of the show. Someone else saw our exchange and tweeted, “I say tweet about enjoyment but not spoilers…”

Different people have different standards, and I think an acceptable etiquette will be worked out. We’re in that interesting place where social rules are being worked out. I happen to agree with my defender on Twitter in that example: it’s fine to share enjoyment in real time (one of the changes with the internet – no meaningful time lag any more), but be aware not everyone is able to watch a show going out on its first broadcast but may be keeping up with their Twitter feed in any one of a variety of ways. In my case, my normal habit on Monday nights is to miss [Spooks] because I’m not home but continue to check my Twitter feed on my phone. I don’t normally view the hashtag feeds, but in this case if I’d followed my normal pattern I would have been badly spoilered because at that stage I was following the spoiler-tweep. The spoiler-tweep didn’t understand that, and I do think the balance will be more in my favour than in theirs. However, I’m aware there are others who may think what I had done was too much. After all, it gave away that about half way through something worth tweeting about occurred.

I feel the balance, though, is more in my favour not just because of my defender but through the behaviour of those who I follow and my friends in our discussions in real life. In real life we check to see if our friends have caught up on something, or if they don’t mind being spoilered, and adapt our conversation to suit. That seems to work. The difference is that online the numbers who can “overhear” are unknowable. “Overhear” is not really what’s going on, of course, because on Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites most “conversation” is in public. It’s not the same as being down the pub, or at a friend’s home at a party, or even walking down a crowded street.

Finally, I hope you appreciate how I resisted spoilering those Doctor Who, Blake’s 7, [Spooks] and Buffy episodes.