Spectacle-playing: ways of playing shared on YouTube

Abstract

Playing is fundamental to children's health and in the last decades it has been crossed by the new digital technologies, shaping new manners of subjectivation. This paper aims to investigate the manner of play shared through online videos. Using "play" as a keyword in YouTube, we selected the top hundred videos which were the submitted to a categorical content analysis. Homogenization, commodification, and monetization cross the ways of playing in the context of the videos. We utilize the categories of screen-toy, playing of having possessions and spectacle-playing, the latter being the corollary of the former two. We analyzed that playing, within this context, is performed for another, shaped and edited to be legitimated, in addition to being colonized by individualistic values, with creativity and spontaneity in play being practically absent.

Keywords:
Play and Playthings; Child; Internet