Toy Unboxing: Living in a(n Unregulated) Material World

• In Event: Thoroughly Mixed Bag: Consumption, Culture, and Celebrity

Abstract

The phenomenon of toy unboxing describes rapidly scaling and commercializing videos featuring the opening, assembling, and demonstration of children's toys, often by children, that has fostered concerns by parents and advocates. This article provides a brief history of this phenomenon while engaging with the nuanced regulatory questions it provokes. We describe how these videos represent forms of creator labor and operate within the structural and material interests of social media entertainment, or communitainment. Coined by the authors, communitainment refers to a proto-industry featuring pro-amateur content creators engaging in content innovation and media entrepreneurship across multiple social media platforms to aggregate global fan communities and incubate their own media brands. Our analysis accounts for how unboxing videos work both for children as agents and as small businesses, and provides some evidence for more nuanced regulatory approaches.

Authors

• David Craig, U of Southern California

• Stuart Duncan Cunningham, Digital Media Research Centre, Queensland University of Technology