YouTube and the restructuring of play: A media (auto)poetics of toy unboxing videos

Abstract

Toy unboxing videos are a popular and lucrative form of children’s entertainment on YouTube. This essay undertakes a media (auto)poetics of these videos and their relationship to children’s play through an integrated analysis of technology (media ecology), text (rhetorical criticism) and participant experience (autoethnography). Based on this analysis, I argue that toy unboxing videos foster and promote a form of ‘play as advertising’ via three key structural features: (1) repetition of the interest-excitement affect, (2) object fetishization and (3) direct address. In a concluding section of the essay, I reflect on the implications of the preceding analysis for digital media criticism, online advertising and children’s play.

Communicating for Sustainability in the Digital Age: Toward a New Paradigm of Literacy

“…The structural biases of digital media, by contrast, favor modes of information processing and habits of mind that are obstinate, associational, impulsive, and affectively charged [20]. This mindset aligns well with the aims and purposes of advertising and marketing [106], where the explicit goal of communication is to manipulate people into purchasing goods and services. However, in those contexts where citizens value systematic, detached, objective thinking, we ought to avoid digital media in general and social media in particular.…”