Wait wait! Don't tell me!

For anyone who will be watching ''Lost" tonight, or is catching up on this season's episodes, or has considered checking out the series in the future, I have news for you: Shannon is dead.

Not that this should be a big surprise. It happened in November. ABC had teased, for weeks, that its hit show would kill a major character. And even before the episode aired, entertainment wonks had scrambled to leak the secret online. At a certain point, it was hard not to know what was going to happen.

Still, I'm sure I'll get a rash of angry e-mails, berating me for publishing a dreaded spoiler. They'll say they're getting through last season's shows on DVD, or are catching up with stored shows on their TiVos. They'll tell me I've ruined a ''Lost" experience they hoped to have in the future.

To which I'd love to reply: Get over it.

This is not going to make me popular, I know. Spoilers are the bugaboo of modern media, the unfortunate stepchild of on-demand culture. TV is becoming less collective; now, we can watch our favorite shows days later on TiVo, download ''Desperate Housewives" to our iPods, and watch entire seasons of ''The Sopranos" on DVD. And since we're not forced to view things together anymore, some are calling for new standards of etiquette. It's not fair to reveal anything that has happened on TV, the feeling goes, in case someone hasn't gotten around to watching it yet.

Well, I contend that what happens on TV the night before constitutes news, and is thus fit for a newspaper. That's not to say we can't be nice and offer a small grace period. Last summer, I waited a good week before noting in print that Nate Fisher had died on ''Six Feet Under."

But beyond that, facts are fair game. So when I mentioned Nate's death again in December -- and still got a self-righteous e-mail from Canada, accusing me of insensitivity -- I wasn't sympathetic. We all live in the same world, Canada included. Some knowledge is unavoidable.

Here, then, are some basic television literacy facts, like them or not:

Kristin shot J.R.

''St. Elsewhere" was the daydream of an autistic boy.

Kramer's first name is Cosmo.

Mr. Big's real name is John.

Vaughn's name isn't Vaughn.

Every character on ''Six Feet Under" is dead.

This was big TV stuff in its time, and it was fun to hash it out with fellow fans afterward; I talked about last fall's ''Six Feet Under" finale for days. That's a lovely thing about TV; at best, it's a shared experience. Big episodes, series finales, cliffhangers are designed to be witnessed en masse.

And while I'm as big a fan of time shifting as anyone -- it has been rough to be a slave to network programmers -- I also believe there's a bargain implied. If you watch on your own time, you give up complete control over the information. You cannot ask the world to maintain a code of silence. If you were busy making tea in the other room when the Red Sox won the World Series, would you get angry at the masses cheering outside?

Besides, in this era of cross-promotion, it's becoming increasingly hard to keep the information out. The people kicked off of the island on ''Survivor" turn up the next day on CBS's ''The Early Show." The winner of last season's ''Project Runway" gets a highly promoted spinoff. And if you venture on the Internet, the news is everywhere. Even TV shows' official sites flirt with viewers with spoiler sections before episodes air. They realize that part of you wants to look.

Indeed, a whole new sort of collective experience has cropped up around this other sort of spoiler: a chirpy online community, dedicated to ruining TV surprises before they happen. I'll admit that these speculation spoilers, offered regularly on sites like E! Online, Ain't It Cool News, and spoilerfix.com, are a mystery to me. I like to be surprised at plot twists; I never figure them out on my own, anyway.

But the networks actually love them, says Isabelle, the 28-year-old Canadian translator who runs spoilerfix.com and scours the entertainment media to collect spoilers for some 30 shows. (She doesn't want to reveal her last name because she fears that rabid viewers will call her at home. It has happened, she says, to some of her spoiler-mongering friends.)

Knowing that Luka and Abby were getting back together, she contends, has drawn some long-lost viewers to ''ER." Knowing Justine Bateman is expected to show up might bring viewers to the needy ''Arrested Development."

Spoilers ''enhance the viewing experience," she says in an e-mail missive. ''They attract viewers. They create a hype."

As they become a regular part of TV-viewing discourse -- and, presumably, draw more and more complaints -- they're spawning an intricate culture of caveats and apologies. ''Spoiler Alert" crops up more and more often on entertainment websites and in newspaper texts. A TV writer for the Toronto Star last month issued a feverish warning before he revealed the ending of ''A Christmas Story" -- a film that was released in 1983.

Isabelle has her own self-imposed rules: She leaves the biggest surprises for the airwaves. She'll tout that a death is coming, but she won't reveal the name. Yet she admits that, in an age when we take our entertainment seriously, some facts cross the line into news and cannot be avoided. When Ain't It Cool News revealed Shannon's death on ''Lost" ahead of time, she says, she had to print it. She posted a spoiler alert and put the answer behind invisible text.

In that spirit, we can probably agree on some spoiler etiquette.

When you come into work, ask, ''Did you see it last night?" before launching into your many thoughts about last night's ''Prison Break." If you're discussing the show in the hallway, talk quietly until a few days have passed.

If you work for, say, Bravo, creating promos for, say, ''Project Runway," use common sense. Don't run a preview of next week's episode that reveals who will still be ''in" five minutes from now.

Corollary: Don't go looking for trouble. Just because you have a DVR doesn't mean you have to use all of its functions. A friend of mine recently paused the TV during said ''Project Runway" promo and scoured the scene to see who was in it. And then complained about the spoiler. No dice.

Even if it's spoiled, watch anyway. There's always dialogue and character development, cinematography, music. Subplots. Attractive actors.

Or else give up TV entirely and rent a DVD. There's a great movie out there called ''The SixthSense" . . .

Joanna Weiss can be reached at weiss@globe.com.