47 The Cost of Participation Ashley Khoo This essay is taken from Chapter 4 of my dissertation, “Repositioning the Space: Social Media, Participatory Culture, and Who Gets to Participate in Contemporary Musical Theatre.” The previous chapters of this dissertation have documented how social media has restructured participation in contemporary professional musical theatre. In each case, participation was real and the emotional investment genuine. But participation has a cost, and that cost is not evenly distributed. This chapter examines what platform culture costs the people inside it, arguing that the same forces that create visibility also extract labour, enable toxicity, and generate a pressure to remain permanently present that is structurally exhausting. The democratisation that social media appears to offer, and the exploitation it structurally produces, are not opposites but products of the same system. Toxicity and the Cost of Visibility The casting of Dylan Mulvaney in Six: The Musical, discussed in Chapter 3 as evidence of social media expanding representation in professional musical theatre, also demonstrates something more troubling about how platform culture operates. The same platforms that created visibility for Mulvaney became vehicles for coordinated and sustained hate. On a platform designed to maximise interaction rather than moderate its quality, hate and celebration function identically as commercial resources. Van Dijck, Poell and de Waal’s platform society framework explains why. Platforms algorithmically amplify engagement, and outrage generates more engagement than support. As they argue, “the ecosystem itself is not neutral; on the contrary, the ideological tenets inscribed in the ecosystem’s architecture put a formida- ble stamp on what constitutes public value and whose interests are served” (Van Dijck, Poell and de Waal 2018: 22). As established in Chapter 3, the institution that cast Mulvaney benefited from the visibility her casting generated, while the per- former absorbed the personal cost. What Chapter 4 now examines is the specific nature of that cost. Mulvaney acknowledged that she had to “go viral and find my- self in a far-right media firestorm and spend many years and many tears wondering why that was happening” before reaching the Broadway stage (Mulvaney, cited in Evans, 2026). What makes this particularly visible is that it was the MegaSix clip, the very moment the institution designed to generate viral engagement, that be- came the vehicle through which she experienced the most concentrated criticism. As Mulvaney described in April 2026, “when I started in February, I was seeing comments from our first night where people were saying very unkind things about
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