Who says that we are Lost?

September 22, 2004. The beginning. The premiere of the Lost First Season in US. An American television series which in its first season achieved an average of 16,1 million viewers per episode on ABC during the first year. A mass phenomenon which spread out around the world through the different media and it becomes a part of the popular culture in US and also in European countries, as Spain.

Lost, a mixture of drama, suspense and science fiction, is about a plane crash of the Oceanic flight 815 from Sidney (Australia) to Los Angeles (US) which crashes in an Island somewhere in the South Pacific (in reality, the Oahu Island, Hawaii). The survivors try to survive in the Island in where begins to happen some strange situations, as a black smoke which kills people, a polar bear in the middle of the jungle, some other people who already lived in the Island (called the Others)… The series goes taking place in the Island, mixed with flashbacks and flashforwards of every character, even both in the same episode.

The plot of the series and all the mysteries generated by it has created a world fans community. A community which has found on Internet its “operation center”: blogs, groups of Facebook, webs, forums about the different theories of the end, a lot of videos uploaded on YouTube… A perfect example of Transmedia Storytelling, understood as the process in which the information has been dispersed across different delivery channels and each media tries to make its own contribution to the unfolding story (according to Henry Jenkins).

Thus, Spain is one of the European countries in which the “Lost phenomenon” has found more fans, through the broadcasting of the series in Fox channel in Spanish, Cuatro channel and through the different websites on Internet in which users share files or in which you can watch and download series (the most famous in Spain is called Seriesyonkis).

Specifically, the Spanish TV channel Cuatro opened April 26, 2009, Lost complete series with a marathon of six episodes each Sunday, thus it wins more Lost “crazy fans”, who can watch all episodes in a row and in Spanish. With the premiere of the last season, Cuatro made a promo of the broadcasting which was praised by US press (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RecTEQ7BNg8&feature=related). New York Magazine said: “Spain knows how to make a Lost Promo”.

Besides millions of followers of this TV series, there are some of them who prefer Internet for showing their fanaticism. Thus, in Spain we can find one of the blogs which is more followed about Lost, so-called Lostzilla which has achieved to interview some of the main characters as Michael Emerson (Ben Linus), Henry Ian Cusick (Desmond Hume), Mathew Fox (Jack Shephard), Jorge García (Hugo Reyes) o Yunjin Kim (Sun Kwon). Here we can find a perfect example of the so-called “Produsage”, as the creators of this site, users or consumers at first, have become producers of the information and knowledge about the series. So, the people formerly known as the audience (Jay Rosen) are no longer just the audience, because now we have the control of media and we are using it.

In the same way, surfing the Web we find other blogs about Lost created by fans who just discuss about each episode or character of the series, and, as well, we can find a “Lostpedia”, a specialist encyclopedia about the series where Spanish fans can find all kind of curiosity: from every detail about each character since the beginning till forums, interviews, videogames…As we can notice this is a typical example of the so-called Collective Intelligence, thus users are able to contribute to the fans-community knowledge about Lost with some kinds of tools, such as forums, interviews or blogs. Through these communications tools Lost fans can interact, share and collaborate with each other to let all know about some new curiosities about the series or some interesting theories about the end of it. This “wikinomics” (concept created by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams) bring fans together to create a “Lost giant brain”, not only in Spanish, but also in other languages (Deutsch, English, Italian, French…). So this collaboration becomes a mass collaboration of fans distributed over the world in different languages and this collaboration turns the consumer into a producer, so we can call him/her “prod-user” or “prosumer”.

One of the most strange and, at the same time, interesting types of “Lost fanaticism” which has been created in Spain, with unimaginable dimension, is the Groups and Pages in Facebook in which the main topic is the Lost series. Pages and Groups which are winning thousands of fans per day (now, thousands of people who “like” the page) and followers. Pages and Groups totally implausible: from more simples Groups/Pages about some characters or moments of the series till some others which relate fiction with real life (e.g. some Groups relate the volcanic ash of Iceland with the black smoke in the Island, played by John Locke). Some examples of this mass phenomenon are (all in Spanish): I hit my head with a tree and I forget how to speak English, but I can write it down (1.354 people like this); I also think that Iceland went too far with the Lost tribute (45.228 people); the volcanic ash of Iceland is John Locke (6.168 people); I know how Lost will end: with a black screen where is written “Lost” (2.964); I also think that Dharma controls Megavideo pushing the button each 72 minutes (3.259 members); I hate when I move an island and then I don’t know when I’ve put it (35.182 members) and so on.

As we can see, Lost has become a mass phenomenon, group intelligence, new specific world where the prosumer is collaborating and sharing information with other prosumers, discussing about the series, building the Lost community-knowledge.