“The collaborative intelligence of humanity”, says Thompson, is like “one big Sherlock Holmes, craving problems that suit its peculiar powers” (173). After the shocking finale on season two, in which Sherlock jumps off a building to his apparent death, writers Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss left their fans with one mind boggling puzzle to be solved: How did Sherlock survive? Though, perhaps the provocative hints carefully times and placed both on air and off make the passivity of the verb “left” decidedly inadequate. The puzzle was thrown into the feverishly typing hands of the viewers, the learned audience who was already equipped with the assumption that Sherlock Holme did somehow manage to live. Nothing seemed enough to satisfy the collaborative audience, no screenshot left unpicked by the hungry theorists eating away at minutes of carefully filmed plot.

  As a writer, I am very interested in the new roles that the creators of the show have employed to their advantage: to be the masterminds behind a convincing but almost impossible to solve case. Moffat is known to keep in touch with the fans and their theories, saying in one statement that he'd "been online and all the theories and there's one clue that everyone's missed. It's something that Sherlock did that was very out of character, but which nobody has picked up on." It became increasingly clear that this show, like so many others now, was built around the assumption of an intelligent audience that sought after a plot they could only follow completely by replaying scenes and formulating theories with other watchers. 

The goal of much of the media that we are exposed to is to create an interactive following that makes each person feel that they are an active part of the story. According to Thompson, “collaborative thought projects that succeed are the ones where each act of participation, no matter how small, excites and rehumanizes us” (172). In what sense it rehumanizes us is unclear, and is certainly a point of discrepancy. Still, there remains this new unifying aspect to technology that is a counterbalance to the threat of isolation, and it will continue to emerge most in the amateur sphere where common interest serves no greater purpose than to appreciate good storytelling.

thompson

1. Links to Amateur Creators
2. Sherlock The Network