Toy unboxing: living in a(n unregulated) material world

Abstract

The phenomenon of toy unboxing describes rapidly scaling and commercialising videos featuring the opening, assembling and demonstration of children’s toys, often by children, across social media platforms. This phenomenon has fostered concerns by parents and advocates around children’s access to and participation in social media. This article provides a brief history of this phenomenon, noting the very limited scholarship on the issue while engaging with the new regulatory questions it provokes. We describe how these videos represent forms of creator labour and operate within the structural and material interests of social media entertainment (SME). SME refers to a proto-industry featuring professionalising-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 for children both as agents and as small businesses and provides pointers to more nuanced regulatory approaches.