"We're Riding Splash Mountain at 10:07 a.m.": An Autoethnography of Walt Disney World's MyMagic+, Touringplans.com, and the Curriculum of Planned Spontaneity

• In Event: 46.053 - The Disney Curriculum: Pedagogies of Being and Buying

Abstract

In late 2013, The Walt Disney Company began to roll out a new service at the Walt Disney World resort, MyMagic+ (The Walt Disney World Company, 2014). The service had several features that promised to enhance visitors’ experiences in all aspects of the resort, from the various hotels to the theme parks. While the marketing behind MyMagic+ has been centered on how the service can enhance guests’ experiences, the focus of this essay is MyMagic+ as a curriculum, where curriculum is defined much in line with the editors’ reference to “big” curriculum (Schubert, 2006). As such, MyMagic+ is a curriculum in which consumers are “taught” how to interact with the Walt Disney World Resort. This essay is an autoethnography of the author’s experiences in using MyMagic+ as well as previous and subsequent visits to the Walt Disney World Resort in order to wrest away specific aspects of the Walt Disney World experience. These tokens of experience will be placed under several theoretical lenses to further elucidate their connection to neoliberalism.

Author

• Gabriel Stephen Huddleston, Texas Christian University