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As a part of making Denmark ready to face globalization the Danish government sharpens its demands for the usefulness of research, in the usual tone the minister for educational affairs says “either you produce useful research or we will shut you down”. Of course useful here only means making research that can go directly into producing products that we can sell.
In response to this I am very tempted to follow Derrida who in the Right to Philosophy argues for the right to produce highly-qualified uselessness – so I will spend the rest of the weekend thinking of how I can make my project as useless as possible – of course of the highly-qualified kind ;-).
In the 330 (!) suggestions the government has made for globalizing Denmark, I have not been able to find any mention of giving more respect to people of other colour, religion, sexual orientation or whatever. In the light of the Mohammed Drawings this would seem as a good suggestion. What’s the point of producing goods, when nobody will buy them?
Sorry for the structure of this entry – perhaps a part of its uselessness (?) – but apparently Derrida can be used to quit smoking. Dave Boothroyd writes in Deconstruction and Everyday Life, or How Deconstruction Helped Me Quit Smoking:

Can theory be used to bring about practical effects? And, if so, are there limits to its field of applicability? Smoking is, after all, an ‘everyday practice’ of the smoker. If one wanted to effect a ‘life change’ of this order one might, more likely, turn to the genre of ‘self-help’ literature directed at everyday life than to high theory. Alternatively, a cultural studies investigation of the political economy of the tobacco trade or of tobacco advertising, conceivably for some smokers might change their understanding of their habit and the source of their compulsion by revealing its imbrications in broader cultural contexts and issues. Anti-smoking propaganda, too, might, with the intention of intervention, address populations of smokers and smoking as a cultural habit. Turning to deconstruction: is there any sense in which, or any ‘scale’ on which, its relation to the everyday could produce results? Can such theory be used to intervene concretely, to make an alteration to a particular instance of the everyday life - of an individual or a population, for example? Is deconstruction relevant to any particular domain of lived culture such that interventions, even on the smallest scale, are possible to anticipate? Could it, for instance, help me quit smoking?

I will give this a shot, reading Derrida and quit smoking at the same time, don’t really know if this is a nightmare come true or a dream……

I have written an abstract for the EASST conference in Lausanne in August and have just been told that they accepted my paper, so now I just have to do it – should be fun though. Here is the abstract:

Becoming User, Becoming Designer - Social Software and the Emergence of User-Designer Cultures

When using social software, such as flickr.com, operating with open APIs (making it possible to alter the technologies), being a user is no longer a valid concept and technology cannot be thought of as something being designed and distributed in the world as a black box. Theories developed in ANT and other areas of STS such as SCOT still operate with some sort of distinction between production of technology and contexts of use when it comes to design. In relation to issues like these social software provokes our ideas of design and use of technology. Adrian Mackenzie’s concept of technology as transduction can facilitate our understanding of the development of social software, where users shift between different forms of becoming (in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense). So instead of users we should start talking about becoming-designer and becoming-user.

In social software technology contingency seems to be the primary parameter in the network established by the different actors. Surprisingly contingency does not decrease domestication it actually furthers it, because users are becoming designers and hereby more familiar with the technology in the cultures surrounding design, use and development of social software. This can be seen as a fulfilment of the ideas inherent in participatory design.

These tendencies are evident if we look at the design and use of applications developed to support the use of flickr.com such as ShoZu, FlickrTools and FlickrToys. By analysing the emergent cultures surrounding flickr.com and interviewing the people behind ShoZu I will show why social software pushes our understanding of design and use.