Global Fandom Jamboree Conversation: Clara Cisneros Hernández (Mexico) and Pablo Escandón Montenegro (Ecuador) (Round One)

Replay 

Pablo Escandón Montenegro - Quito, Ecuador

The fandom culture, who participate in the creation, transformation and dissemination of cultural or media content, in Ecuador is completely linked to the participation of users who contribute to social memory with their knowledge and life stories around the possession of a photograph, knowledge of the scene or the recovery of material that becomes patrimonial, when valued by users.

In social media, mainly on Facebook, there are more than twenty spaces dedicated to the recovery and dissemination of old, historical and everyday photographs and images, which are shared on the pages created for this purpose. On more than one occasion, the same image has recirculated between several pages, because those who make up the community of that digital space, also integrate the others and consider that this contribution should circulate between the different pages in which they are registered and actively participate.

Digital communities, such as Cita con la Memoria, a fan page with restricted access, and managed by a university professor of more than 60 years from the city of Portoviejo, on the country's coast, and the Quito fan page Quito de aldea a ciudad, a free access page, managed by a retired high school teacher of more than 60 years, maintain an authority structure. The administrator is the one who authorizes, guides and promotes user conversations through questions about graphic content.

User participation is relatively frequent. Once the characters or locations of the city are identified, mainly, users stop contributing, and administrators do not generate more comment to revitalize contributions; then they generate a new publication, with the same dynamics.

It is important that the photographs and graphic resources disseminated in these spaces attract the attention of users, who not only share in other groups, but also, in many cases, redefine the graphic document with colorization, if the photograph is black and white, or they tell anecdotes that are related to the official story but delve into the stories lived by the users, or they recover the collective memory, with allusions to stories told by grandparents or relatives.

In this way, the Facebook space becomes a mini learning room about the daily history of a city, its people and the families that are still summoned from the anecdotes in common.

It is important to highlight that Cita con la Memoria, being a restricted group, has a participation of older adult users, on average; while Quito de aldea a ciudad has convened various age groups, since it also promotes guided tours of the city of Quito, with non-tourist circuits, which generates family interest beyond participation in the social environment.

In this way, the communities provide unofficial information about events, people and places that make up the past of Quito and Portoviejo.

Replay – Round 1 

Clara Cisneros Hernández – Mexico City

The communities of followers and fans online for the Mexican Republic, working in a very similar way to how it is assigned in Quito, formalize in social networks a useful and indispensable tool in the dissemination and promotion of virtual spaces for public use that have allowed the linking social and identity affinities in parallel to processes of creation, recreation, socialization and consumption.

Specifically, La Finisterra as a group of researchers dedicated to the creative industries in Mexico City have followed up on the public urban space recognized as the Frikiplaza, a specialized commercial area that, for more than fifteen years, has been positioned as a place of mercantile activations open to the general public in more than 20 states of the country, where young Mexicans meet to share multiple interests and hobbies, enabling the construction of identity values ​​and rituals that consumers adapt to their daily lives.

With the arrival of the pandemic and after the closure and subsequent reopening of public venues, Frikiplaza has given priority to maintaining niches of consumption, identities and cultural processes based on management of various activations in social networks. The physical space expanded to the virtual environment, giving rise to the extension of the identity experience.

Facebook and Instagram are established as the most confluent social networks in the area that, through the use of advertising and marketing models, have allowed the expansion of symbolic systems established as buying and selling models, based on sectors such as video games, animation, comics, music, film and television industries, among others, which provide various commercial supply-demand paths.

In this way, the commercial area is extended to promote a virtual comnunities, where the organizational administrators of the Frikiplaza encourage feedback, providing a continuous communication channel with young consumers between 10 and 35 years old. In their daily activity of expression on these platforms, they help to provide reaction analytics within topics of interest among hobbies and products disclosed by the merchants of their structure. Due to this organizational scheme, the administrators manage to obtain immediate answers to resolve the needs of each of the confluent social groups of the campus. In this way the "collective physical space" breaks limits and is dimensioned as a "virtual public space" that is kept supplied from the advertising application.

Young people prevail as catalyst agents of recreation that carry out the appropriation of symbolic systems in the practice of consumption and socialization,. Decanted through their hobbies, these participants will arrive at a format of convergence of cultures, fostering a space of multicultural convergence. The means of communication, therefore, in the virtual space is triggered by advertising directed at multiple confluent niches, where individual consumers in a dynamic flow re-signify and adopt culturally. In this phenomenon, users and fans in turn can generate a confrontation in consideration of their own culture, where it could be rejected, hybridized or resignified.

As Gilberto Giménez (2000) points out, identity requires a subjective re-elaboration of existing cultural elements. To achieve a social construction, the individual needs to carry out a negotiation with the environment, otherness and its symbolic frameworks, in where it makes a dynamic self-affirmation opposed by external actors and situations, both physical and virtual.

Thus, these enclosures within the most important cities of the Mexican Republic allow the reaffirmation of various social identities. Organizational strategists build specific areas for the construction of activations where local socialization practices are dimensioned that allow the ritualization and manifestation of daily habits of expression, lifestyle and consumption. In this case, the advertising model available in its social networks constantly reaffirms and legitimizes to keep diverse fandoms, recurring users and identity groups paid.

In both Quito and in Mexico, digital spaces aimed at select niches in some way need to be guided by an administration that promotes conversation and that in a certain way facilitates the pathways to address the identity, reaction and cause. of socialization in order to promote feedback, being an essential element to ensure and maintain in the long term, the confluence and the community activity. It should not be overlooked that virtual spaces must maintain constant gratification or motivators that allow the like-minded communities to be maintained.

In turn, it is observed that visual resources for online communities are manifested as symbolic axes necessary to generate responses, as well as guidelines that allow meaning, appropriation and resignification that in parallel derive in the release of intellectual, recreational and learning activities collective that are established as motivators that allow to preserve the recurrent activity of the user.