Lost spoiler practices: Online interaction as social participation

The American television network ABC’s serialized drama Lost (2004-10) is a key example of recent media culture where both viewers and producers utilize a range of digital media tools to advance the narrative: producers through transmedia storytelling strategies and the creation of complex narratives, and viewers through tracing, dismantling – and sometimes questioning – content in order to create coherent meanings in the maze of narratives. Online audiences, such as spoiler communities, may uncover components of transmedia storytelling, discuss their validity and enhance them with individual and collective content production, thus negotiating purposes and interpretive practices with producers and amongst themselves. Through critical discourse analysis of key instances where the Lost community collaborates over resources beyond the official Lost transmedia narratives, this article argues and documents that interactions between Lost audiences and producers operate as forms of social participation when spoiler-seeking audiences work to unravel, challenge and predict the narrative while the producers seek to orchestrate transmedia storytelling experiences. Our results serve as a sobering empirical critique of the more celebratory claims made about the emancipatory potentials of participatory online practices.