Technologies of the childhood imagination: Yu-Gi-Oh!, media mixes, and everyday cultural production

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