Communicating with home, coping without home – Trusting to the mediating capacity of blogging

Abstract

In the early 21st century, blogs exploded onto the digital media scene and soon became a popular means of travel writing. However, rather than considering blogs as a straightforward tool to simply share stories and experiences, in this article, we set out to explore the role of blogs as a mediating technology (Verbeek, 2005a), especially during difficult times abroad. By analysing the blogs of expatriate Australians who were volunteers in Bangladesh in 2014/2015 as well as interviews with the bloggers, we are able to show how the blogs' affordances inform the coping process, highlighted, in particular, in an active and highly reflective engagement with the blog's unique situatedness at the cusp of the public/private. In this way we wish to contribute to a better understanding of the ways in which “trusting oneself” to this specific communication technology (Kiran and Verbeek, 2010) is being experienced and facilitates sense-making in complex, and often stressful, human-world-technology relations. Foregrounding the ways in which blogs actively mediate and thus contribute to representations of the world, this article resonates with recent work on “earth writing” as a geographical practice (Springer, 2017; Wylie, 2018), and hopes to open up further debates on digital earth writing.