Paper long abstract:

Based on 18 months of fieldwork focused on the study of intensive bloggers in Spain this paper discusses how expectations are enacted in the everyday material practices of a group of individuals that expect to transform society (mass media, science and politics) through their blogging practice. Drawing on the concept of inscription (Latour, 1999) I describe how blogs and bloggers interactions are materially inscribed (in the form of statistics of visitors, for instance) in a massive way by blog technological infrastructures. I highlight how present facts are materialized in graphics of visitors and lists of incoming links and expectations of the future are materially enacted when exceptional facts take place (an unusual wave of visitors, v.g.). I then argue that the inscription of the present is the condition of possibility for the performance of future expectations through an infrastructure that take part in the everyday enacting of hope among bloggers.