The children swiped fast across the colorful images. Their thumbs flicked from one square to the next, their eyes tracking the images, seemingly hypnotized, pausing only to show one another what had become their class’s viral sensation.
Held tightly in their hands weren’t smartphones, iPads or video game controllers, but motionless, low-tech stacks of paper stickers.
In the weeks leading up to the World Cup, Argentines were hunting to fill sticker albums with the faces of every player on every team competing in the tournament.
Driven in part by a contagious hype, the need to soothe World Cup anxiety in a soccer-obsessed nation and the persistence of an intergenerational tradition, Argentina has been swept by a collecting fever that seems immune to the digital revolution that has obliterated so many other analog pastimes.
For several weeks, Argentine children have left their smartphones untouched for long stretches as they have gathered to swap stickers in schoolyards, parks, supermarkets, shopping malls and below the same ombú trees where their parents and grandparents once met long ago to trade postal stamps and coins.
