Hope assemblages. An ethnography of passionate blogging

Abstract

The Internet and digital technologies have been accompanied by promises of future since their birth. I use the concept of hope in this article to refer to this particular orientation towards the future. I elaborate my argument drawing on ethnography of passionate bloggers, individuals that blog intensively, that are highly reflective with their practice and are engaged with the transformation of society. I present and discuss the production of expectations that accompany their hope and point out to two key issues in its coming into being. First, I refer to the performance of intense temporalities in blogging and discuss the decisive role of the Blogosphere infrastructure in this instance, it is by producing past facts that infrastructure provide the conditions of possibility for elaborating future expectations. Second, I conceptualize bloggers’ hope as a heterogeneous assemblage that destabilizes the ontology of the present by opening spaces of future possibility.