True Blood is a great example of the knowledge community that has formed with the renewed craze of vampires that has occurred lately. Although it differs from the knowledge community of Twilight, it still has avid followers, and a pretty big group of people that are well informed within this community.
Like Jenkins describes, a knowledge community is technically broken up into shared and collective knowledge. “Shared knowledge, information that is believed to be true and held in common by the entire group and collective intelligence, the sum total of information held individually by the members of the group that can be accessed in response to a specific question.” Some of the basics that keep the True Blood community alive and in existence are: knowing who the characters are (and their relations to each other as well as what they specifically are), as well as following the various plot lines that they have going on throughout the show. Without these, one would not be able to be a part of the community, because then the community itself would not be sustained since it would not make sense.
It is interesting that Jenkins mentions that not a single “creature” can gather all the information there is on a topic and so that society depends on certain individuals, and therefore shared knowledge, to maintain its existence.
The reliance we have on collective intelligence as communities to “combine our expertise,” is essentially what brings these communities together, since the particular individuals serve as a source of information for those that may not have the answers to a specific question. Since it has been established that we cannot know everything on our own, we rely on our particular knowledge community to keep us informed on something we may have missed, or on a particular aspect of (in this case the show) that we did not fully comprehend. It’s no wonder these communities are becoming so social in a way (especially since you usually would not watch TV on your own anyway). I know a lot of people in the True Blood community who will host get together’s at their places to watch the new episode, or just have a couple of friends over (like I would do), so that at least you have someone to comment on the show with. It’s also a form of sharing knowledge because sometimes you may miss something a character did or said, and therefore can refer back to the other person watching the show. This also comes into play when referring to informative videos that will recap what has been going on (much like the one at the beginning of this blog), as well as the blogs, like this, that will let you know the inside scoop on what is going on within the show, or even within characters after the episode has ended, making the "virtual community" come to life.