If you’re among the one million people who reportedly listen to each episode of “Serial,” you already know that the podcast centers on the 1999 death of the high school student Hae Min Lee, and the conviction of her ex-boyfriend Adnan Syed for her murder. You’ve followed the show’s host, Sarah Koenig, as she tries to determine whether Mr. Syed really killed Ms. Lee. You may or may not know (though the size of the latter category is shrinking) that parallel investigations of the crime are taking place on Reddit and elsewhere, and that those investigations are inspiring debates of their own.
At The Atlantic, Adrienne LaFrance considers the ethics of following a real murder like it’s a TV show: “Is it okay to be enthralled by all this? A person was murdered. In real life. And yet ‘Serial’’s fans — is it weird to call them fans? — gather around the show like it’s ‘Twin Peaks.’”
Those fans (or whatever you call them) aren’t just passively consuming the show, either. Some are joining in on the quest. Ms. LaFrance writes: “Serialized nonfiction in the Internet age means that conversations that might have previously happened around the watercooler are now being published themselves. Which means ‘Serial’’s audience is producing its own stories full of sleuthing, critique, and conspiracy theories.”
And, she posits, “maybe the ethical implications of this kind of storytelling are less McLuhanian — they’re not so much about the medium being the message — and more about the cultural context that shapes this moment in broadcast. In other words, maybe it has more to do with the show’s listeners than it does with its producers.”
At The Guardian, Michelle Dean examines listener sleuthing in greater depth. She notes that the SerialPodcast subreddit, where fans can debate the facts of the case, raises a number of difficult questions. Users aren’t supposed to post identifying details of people involved in the story, except for those revealed in the podcast, but moderators may not always be aware when they do. The subreddit has become a forum for personal attacks on Mr. Syed and others, some of which may have legal ramifications. And, Ms. Dean notes, “people who were involved in the crime may very well be reading it, too.”
She quotes Jacob White, one of the subreddit’s moderators: “My worst case scenario is that a responsible party to the murder is watching the sub, gets tipped off that evidence to their guilt is surfacing, and are able to evade arrest because of us.”
And, she writes: “The episodic and shifting nature of ‘Serial’ has (apparently inadvertently) invited a host of people to imagine themselves Koenig’s collaborators. Or, to put it another way: Reddit has become part of the story, just as much as Koenig herself already is.”
Ms. LaFrance ends up coming down on the pro-“Serial” side: “Just because something is suspenseful doesn’t make it unethical. What ‘Serial’ really reveals is that the ethical questions it raises about crime reporting and the treatment of victims in the media are the ones we should already be asking.”
In some ways, we were — Ms. Dean mentions Redditors’ efforts to identify the Boston bombers, and their aftermath: “Ever since their rush to cover the Boston Marathon bombing in real time led Redditors to identify the wrong suspect, members of the site have been a lot more queasy about privacy and responsibility.”
The case explored in “Serial” isn’t the first to inspire widespread Internet speculation, or to raise the specter of harm to the wrongfully accused or to the families of victims. But “Serial” has brought such speculation and its potential consequences to the fore in a unique way — because it’s going to go on for 12 weeks, and because it’s got so many people hooked (more than one has made the “Breaking Bad” comparison), it’s likely to keep attention focused on its online offshoots for at least that long. Ms. Dean notes that the episodic nature of “Serial” has spawned would-be collaborators — it may also keep us talking about those collaborators and what their collaboration means.
An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to the affiliation of “Serial.” It is a spinoff of "This American Life," not an NPR podcast.