Global Fandom: Pablo Escandon (Ecuador)

Ecuador, fandom and participation around ancient photography

The study of online communities is important to know the causes and motivations that summon a group of people in a digital space: how is their relationship, how is the way they consume and disseminate information and what are the contents and their dynamics of interactions, but it is also important to know the ages of the members to know how they take on the platform and its relationship with media education. It is also necessary to know how fans feel around a communicative topic, action or product.

Although fans of TV series, movies, music or audiovisual series, as well as video games, are identified and fragmented, the massive number of fans around football and historical photographs on Facebook is not, understood as memory retrieval practices and recirculation of popular knowledge, without the mediation of a curator or gallery owner, much less a museologist or historian, to edit or moderate the discourse.

The dissemination of old photography is a very common practice on the Facebook network and users in Ecuador have made this platform the ideal space to share centralized stories based on the dissemination of archive photographs that administrators of pages such as Quito de aldea a ciudad, Cita con la memoria, Fotos antiguas del fútbol ecuatoriano, Recordando a Quito, Los ladrillos de Quito, among others, are carried out among their followers, with which they propose challenges of identifying spaces, characters, years and practices.

Since 2018, the forms of collaboration, moderation and participation in these digital spaces have been observed, which are managed by people over 60 years old and who have a photographic and newspaper archive, which could well be in a historical archive or as a background of a local museum, but that has decentralized from the formal exhibition and has found in social media the appropriate way to share stories and recreate historical moments, not only with the comments on the platform, but they go further with the proposal of Guided walks through the city, in order to appreciate the urban transformation, as Quito does from village to city, or the radio encounters that Cita con la memoria does, in the city of Portoviejo, to talk about everyday issues of the city, from the photograph of the memory.

The fanatics are in the 40´s and 50´s age. The teenagers or young adults are not the objective public of these digital spaces, because the physical exhibitions can convocate families and schoolars with teachers in urban places where the photographies are displayed.

Likewise, football history spaces resort to the exhibition of photographs taken from printed media and their own files to dialogue with fans about players, stadiums, results of championships and clothing.

This work is about how Facebook pages have become relatively cybermuseums, central containers for various digital and non-digital activities, which enhance the physical visit to a heritage space, mainly the urban one, to verify its transformation. One of the important characteristics of the cybermuseum is to create community and generate forms of appropriation of heritage, from an aesthetic characteristic of the community where it is settled, and that from the evocation generates its own poetics in its speeches.

The generation gap is important when creating content and positioning them on platforms, since the consumption and forms of relationship are different because the administrator marks his identity and has created a particular sociability with the members, which results in share similar aesthetic processes and consumptions, which do not require younger generations or age groups.

The administrator of a page on Facebook sets the aesthetics and rhythms of participation, to which users are assimilated. Therefore, the reputation of the administrators or guides is shaped by the input, moderation and knowledge that they demonstrate in the community. The members contribute to the construction of the story proposed by the administrator, granting it the authority to disseminate and generate content based on the established guidelines, which makes the community have a hierarchical relationship with the administrators of the spaces.

The configured communities look for authority figures who channel their interests, who deliver other types of content that they cannot find in official spaces, for this reason they look for factual constructions that are closer to the aesthetic-poetic that appeals to their subjectivity, that removes their memories and do not stay in nostalgia.

It is important to note that many of the members of each community integrate several spaces, since they find in them the complementarity of information and formats, supported by a methodological similarity in the activities of routes and walks. Therefore, it is thanks to this diversification of members in relation to belonging to networks and communities, that a polarized network structure is presented, which has similar intersections or encounters due to the presence of users in each community.

The online users find that Facebook is the best "medium" for exchange and dissemination, as well as meeting, but they requires more audiovisual content that motivates their consumption, that is interactive and generates interaction between members of the communities, actions that are important to maintain the curiosity and participatory spirit of those who are interested in these topics, with which the proposal hypermedia is aimed at motivating users to establish new walking routes within the city, under a random and / or thematic scheme outside the official tourist conventions.

The fandom culture as we traditionally know it around DC comic productions, Marvel or Disney audiovisual productions have their followers, but they are expressed in the purchase and marketing products, not in permanent or organized communities. The Comic Con is a meeting that takes place in the portuary city of Guayaquil, as an opportunity to generate business among the stores that sell products like merchandising.

Quito de aldea a ciudad: https://www.facebook.com/quito.aldeaaciudad

sell products like merchandising.

Quito de aldea a ciudad: https://www.facebook.com/quito.aldeaaciudad

Ecuador: fotos antiguas colorizadas.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/316318006036425/?hoisted_section_header_type=recently_seen&multi_permalinks=616290999372456

Fotografías antiguas del fútbol ecuatoriano

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1063318734047308

Pablo Escandón Montenegro

Professor at Simón Bolívar Andean University of Ecuador, academic coordinator of posgraduate program in Digital Communication, narrative transmedia researcher and writer of hipermedia.

pablo.escandon@uasb.edu.ec