- “So, have you heard the great news?”

-”What…?”

- “Well, a few days ago the boarders of the Norwegian continental shelf was decided upon by a UN commission dealing with that type of thing. Apparently we’re lucky because our nautical territory was expanded with, like, a quadrillion squaremiles or something. The newspapers said it might be worth billions of kroners in oil revenues over the comming years. Great news, right?

- “I wouldn’t be to sure about that… I’ve heard there’s a bunch of smelly, treehuging hippies who’s standing in a circle, banging a drum and chanting that it’s time to consider the cod, and the ecosystems and whatnot…”

- “Damn, those rascals! I guess they haven’t heard yet how this magnificent organic fluid have blessed us all!”

- “Ah, I suppose you’re right. But how can we lure them to our side? Their chanting-techniques are fierce, and I’ve heard rumors of a mean Chai Latte..”

- “I’m not sure, really, we need a cunning plan. Something unexpected”

- “Well, these people are youngsters, aren’t they? And if there’s one thing I know about kids it’s that they’re suckers for TV and ad’s. It’s like drugs for them. Melts their brains more than that chai will ever do, and then we mold them. I learned this in the army. Break down, and re-build. If we could only trick one of those anarchoid-hippies intto singing for us as well…”

- “But’s let’s not make it to obvious. We’ll sneak in a hint of prostitution, just to make it seem plausible. Don’t forget, we’re evil. Repeat after me: Break-Down! Re-Build! Excellent!”

- “Muhuhuhuhaaaaa!”

- “But wait! What if we could make the scheme even more diabolical?”

- “But how could we possibly…”

- “One word. The internet”

- “Actually that’s two, but yeah. I hear the kids are all about cyberspace these days. Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

- “Porn?!!?”

- “Keep your pants on, mister! I was thinking more in the line of a website. Call me traditional, but…”

- “Brilliant! We’ll make a website! With all sorts of content on it!”

- “Yes. Let’s make it all mysterious and strange with all sort of noises going to and through. A drum here, a sitar there. Make the hippies feel at home.”

“Oh! And let’s have something like a blog. Only it’s not. So we’ll call it a blop,  where people can praise oil. And then we’ll publish a book of this, to show how much Norwegians love their petrol. Jeeez, this is good!”

- “We’ll need celebrities, of course. Kids listens to celebrities.”

- “Evil celebrities…”

- “What about Fabian Stang?”

- “That’s a good start. But his mother would be even more helpful!”

- “Muhuhuhuhuhuha! Good, good! Let’s keep feeding them. Eyvind Hellstrøm, Frederic Hauge and Basim Ghozlan just to spice it up for those religioid kids.

- “Oh, this is great! But wait! These guys are hippies, right? I’ve heard some hippies tend to disregard celebrity-statements…”

- “Don’t worry, I’ve thought of that. These guys have ‘heart’. Luckilly this makes them vulnurable to our obviously evil plans. We’ll have to emulate these ‘emotions’ somehow. You know – feelings and all that la-di-da.”

- “Allright, I have and idea. What if we find a coupple of sick people, you know – clients of our oil-paradise wellfare system. We interview them about oil, making it seem like they would be rotting in the gutter if they lived in an oil-free nation.”

- “Yes, yes! And then we show them someone with children. Hippies love children, because they are smelly like other hippies.”

“Clever! I think by now we should have put an end to all this nonsense. Filthy hippies, it’s about time they start thinking about the future, for a change.”

With the easter holliday behind us the next coupple of months should ideally be very productive. For me this means a) data collection, b) essay writing, and c) whatever else there is time for. During data collection I will, of course, be practicing a lot of scientific method.

This practice, incidentally, is what I’ll be writing an essay on for a methods course I’m taking this semester (which all of a sudden*, it appears, resumes with lectures tomorrow). More precisely I’m thinking about writing an essay on the discrepancy between methodology, as described in a scientific papers methodology-section, and methodology as it is actually carried out or performed on a day-to-day basis by people working in the humanities and social sciences. I thought I’d use some of my own (very limited) work as a kind of case study. I want to do an introspective analysis of some snippets of my research in order to expose how we, on paper, construct a scientific universe which is much more clean, “sterile” and pure than the methods we in fact use. One short example: Think about how we (or at least some of us) often write that we “apply” this or that method to some material or other. This implies that there is a reality out there which we, the researchers, could capture simply by the application of methodology. Much like a wall becomes red when red paint is applied, scientific results emerge when method is applied, be it qualitative or quantitative. Look at this simple example found searching the term “qualitative methods were applied” in google scholar. Carvalho et al. explain how:

I. Qualitative methods were applied in the analysis of textual data.

II. Categories identified by the analysis were adapted into building the process model.

From this account it sounds as if the “real world” is a lion or some other wild animal, that we can capture  simply by throwing at it our very special net – the scientific method. The actions are clean, there is little room for individual variation. We apply A, B is the result, in this case the identification of several categories. In reality, of course, the process is much more messy, I think we all know this – allthough STS’ers might possibly admit it more easily than, say a “normal” psychologist (as in the example above…). The simple linguistic example of “application” is, of course, only one of many ways in which we camuflage the very mundane nature of what we do.

Not very provocative, nor really a new point (Science in action, anyone?), but I guess I’m sort of going out on a limb by using my own work to display how these things are played out, and I havent quite decided how to do it all yet. The text it self will be a sort of meta-study in the practice I’m talking about since I still have to keep within the framework of a “scientific” text (The methods section could be good fun, I guess). Should give room for a many funny footnotes, as well. All things considered it should  be a healthy reflexive excercise which I sort of look forward to.

*)Yes, really – all of a sudden!