Technologies of the Childhood Imagination: Yu-Gi-Oh!, Media Mixes, and Everyday Cultural Production
Author(s)
Ito, Mizuko
Abstract
Shifting structures of participation in the production/consumption matrix are a common theme in research. This paper approaches this question through ethnographic research on children’s new media – media targeted at a demographic group most often characterized as uniquely passive, uncritical, vulnerable, and receptive. Working with highly technologized and phantasmagoric social sites like otaku practices and the media mix for Japanese children suggests a differently inflected research imaginary for those of us who study media technology. The author’s effort is not to suggest that we have seen a decisive shift in technologies of the imagination, but rather to evoke an emergent set of research questions tied to the new technologies and practices of a rising generation, and to an increasingly transnational network of otaku media hackers.
