The \u201cspoiler\u201d claim has emerged in recent years as a curious symptom of modern-day media ubiquity. We want our iPhones, our digital clouds, and our on-demand instant access to everything. We want to be \u201cfirst!\u201d (a phrase some web-site readers go so far as to vapidly append to stories and blog posts). Except, of course, when we don\u2019t.<\/p>\n
The Olympics flap over NBC\u2019s premature promo-ing (and the ensuing network apology<\/a>) underscores the tension between two cultural expectations media must satisfy: the fastness of information reporting (media as ends), the slowness of mediated experience (media as means). Which is why NBC affiliates are trying to split the difference, encouraging people to watch their televisions as if they were radios: Just look away while the latest results about Michael Phelps display onscreen. One wonders how many people actually follow through on the medium\u2019s startlingly bizarre (and metaphorically suicidal) directive to \u201cstop looking at me.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Historically, the presence of fewer media, combined with the televisual tyranny of broadcast scheduling, forged a social contract that eased the tension between immediacy and mediation: immediacy would wait (let\u2019s say about a day) for mediated events to unfold. Industrial oligopoly and cultural desire had successfully conquered the circumference of the Earth<\/a> and corralled U.S. viewers into prime time.<\/p>\n But now the contract has been shredded. The web waits for no one\u2014including other media\u2014delivering immediacy and mediation without attempting to schedule time (or shift it). In a sense, television slowed us down; it organized the physical world toward anticipated \u201cdestinations\u201d that TV Guide<\/em> dutifully mapped. Under pressure from the web, television must now on occasion\u2014especially around event-based broadcasting, such as the ratings bonanza of the Olympics\u2014revisit old battle scars over what to share, and when.<\/p>\n If this is an episodic struggle in television programming, it\u2019s daily warfare in the web trenches. I can\u2019t recall in recent memory an online film review that isn\u2019t either peppered with \u201cspoiler alert!\u201d headlines or besieged with posts decrying the presence of spoilers. Pity the poor art and media critics working in the digital age, who must risk reader wrath as they sort out, by dint of practice, what really constitutes a spoiler. Perhaps Google Chrome itself should come with a digital sticker declaring, \u201cWarning: The Internet Reveals!\u201d<\/p>\n Less facetiously, I\u2019ve stumbled on my own share of Olympics spoilers in the past week, such as when Facebook friends post their congratulations before events have even been broadcasted. It\u2019s okay, friends! But the ferocity of many spoiler claimants suggests a larger grief with the incursion of ubiquitous, unruly media. This is not just about one sporting event or film review, but rather a profound cultural problem with the speed and fluidity of digital information. Information now resists easy compartmentalization, isolation, and avoidance; in the web, almost anything can constitute the front page\u2014an RSS feed, a link, an email, a phone\u2019s power-up screen. Life today is akin to perpetually walking around with the day\u2019s newspaper under your arm, a new edition materializing there every second. Calling out \u201cspoiler!\u201d becomes the user\u2019s only act of resistance, a way to police information (its content and its flow) within the media space. The only other option, it seems, is nuclear: hitting the \u201coff\u201d button and living like a survivalist, cut off from the modern world. (One technological\u00a0\u201csolution\u201d to what is really a social\/contextual issue about technology\u2019s use<\/em> is a proposal to employ the ROT13<\/a> cipher and copy\/paste translators for sensitive information.)<\/p>\n When television tells its audience to stop watching the screen, we\u2019ve arrived at a place where media production and reception have lost the balance between the values of information firstness and un-spoiled, mediated experiences in stories, games, competitions, and other forms. How various media attempt to sort it out will keep media scholars transfixed (and, hopefully, employed). I, for one, can\u2019t look away.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The \u201cspoiler\u201d claim has emerged in recent years as a curious symptom of modern-day media ubiquity. We want our iPhones, our digital clouds, and our on-demand instant access to everything. We want to be \u201cfirst!\u201d (a phrase some web-site readers … Continue reading