Technologies of the Childhood Imagination: Yugioh, Media Mixes, and Everyday Cultural Production

Many of the essays in this volume bear witness to the powerful alchemy of personal cultural production and communication combined with large-scale networks of digital distribution and archiving. While the implications of peer-to-peer exchange for the media industries have attracted considerable public attention, there has been much less consideration of how these exchanges operate in the everyday practices of individuals. In a world of networked and viral cultural exchange—of cultural life captured in distributed archives, indexed by search engines, and aggregated into microcontent feeds for personal information portals—areas of practice once considered inconsequential dumping grounds of cultural production become irrepressibly consequential, even productive. The despised category of “mass consumption” fractured by several generations of poststructuralists, and corroded by ongoing research in fan and reception studies, may find a still greater foe in the undisciplined practices of teenage music sharing, game hacking, and personal journal blogs. These emergent digital culture forms signal the active participation of previously marginal and invisible groups in what we must now recognize as cultural production, not simply as derivative acts of active consumption or ephemeral personal communication. What does it mean for those previously constructed as “consumers”—non-generative, passive audiences for professionally produced culture—are handed the means not only to distribute media through alternative peer-to-peer networks, but to remix, repackage, re-value, and produce media through amateur cultural production? Shifting structures of participation in the production/consumption matrix are a theme common to many of the essays in this volume (Manovich, Sundaram, Taylor, Nideffer). I approach 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. One focus of my work was Yugioh, the craze among elementary age boys in Japan in the years from 2000-2002. Yugioh is an example of a “media mix” of the type pioneered by Pokemon, integrating different media forms through licensed character content. The Yugioh animation was released in the US in 2001, and now the card game has overtaken Pokemon here in popularity. Pokemon broke new media ground in its repackaging of strategies and narrative forms of video games as content for serialized, non-interactive forms of media (TV, manga). It innovated further in relying on portable and intimate