Participation is Magic

Abstract

This chapter explores the authorial legitimacy and cultural value conveyed by authorship in a venue that might seem unlikely by traditional standards of creativity and art: the nexus of television and toy marketing constituted by the My Little Ponymedia franchise. It theorizes the politics of co-creative participation, rethinking “collaboration” as a concept that can illuminate the power dynamics and hierarchy in industrial media production. It also shows the operation of an “audience function,” where discursively imagined audiences, and the cultural hierarchies in which they are situated, grant meaning and value to the creative practice and identities of authors. These concepts help us to understand that the authorship of participatory media is bound up not just in co-creativity, but also in persistently hierarchical institutions and cultures of industrial production made meaningful and legitimate by all that audiences are imagined to be and who they are imagined to be as participators.

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