The faces of the hobby: A video experiment
As I’ve discussed, Instagram has become a popular space for toy car collectors to share their hobby. However, one important element of any community is largely absent — faces. As collectors imagine and create their online personas, they rarely post anything personal. No selfies, no family portraits, no images of themselves.
This is a problem of presence, as discussed by Matthew Engelke, albeit in a very different context. How can a community form when personas are imagined, when content lacks a familiar author? When a creator is absent from their creations, can strong community bonds still form? In this video experiment, I dug up photos of people who are part of the diecast collectors community in order to encourage thought about the question of presence in that community. Finding these few photos took much longer than you would think.
