Why a Guideline for Spoilers?

Abstract

The avoidance of spoilers is a topic of research, that is usually analysed to understand its pattern and its usefulness. However, there is no known research on this topic combing it with Information Science or Information Avoidance literature. The aim of this thesis was therefore to understand Spoiler Avoidance (SA) from an Information Avoidance (IA) view, treating it as an example of beneficial IA. To accomplish this, a literature overview both on spoiler and IA research was created and this used as basis for a deductive coding-list. Afterwards a number of Guidelines spoilers were collected from Reddit, Fandom, multiple newssites, Wikipedia and Google. Results were found for multiple levels of abstraction. Firstly, spoiler guidelines exist due to difficulties in defining spoilers, different aims of websites and the different desires for users. Secondly it could be found that SA was not always assumed to be positive, but can be explained through many IA-theories. Notably this also held for factors discovered by prior research. Thirdly, this implies that positive IA faces the same critic as negative IA and that IA as a whole can be measured through multiple parallel vectors, instead of only a single scale.