The Knackered Hack office window looks out onto Solsbury Hill (or more precisely Little Solsbury) made famous by our local bard, one Peter Gabriel.

If you strip Gabriel’s song down, it tells a story about options and decision-making, and a powerful one at that. It alludes to the turmoil the lead-singer of Genesis went through after he left that iconic band. He got out in 1975, just before punk arrived, though that was not his motive: more creative exhaustion, as I understand it (one of our broken things, you could say).

If you are my age, you’ll know that admitting to liking Genesis as a teenager amounted to what kids these days call “social death.” However, in our modern eclectic world, all the sins of the past are forgotten; my friend Andy (see Journey of a Lifetime) even went to the Led Zep concert, and he was a dyed-in-the-mohair punk, if ever there was one.

Solsbury Hill (Looking down on)

I doubt that the world of decision-making research is going to anoint Gabriel with any honorary degrees, and it’s a long shot that he might be considered for a Nobel Prize in Economics. But why not? Perhaps he could share it jointly with Paul Simon, who did pioneering work in spreading the understanding of the confirmation bias through the song The Boxer, with what I consider one of the best lines in pop:-

Still, a man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest”

But anyway, our options, and how we exercise them are really fundamental to success, or the avoidance of failure. So I was delighted when the Knackered Hackette’s cousin, Greg, brought to my attention the following New York Times story on Dan Ariely’s new book Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions, because it shows our aversion toward losing options — even when logic dictates that they will have no value to us. Ariely constructed a game to test how we respond to particular pay-offs. Players had to click on doors with rewards behind them:-

As each player went through the 100 allotted clicks, he could switch rooms to search for higher payoffs, but each switch used up a click to open the new door. The best strategy was to quickly check out the three rooms and settle in the one with the highest rewards.

Even after students got the hang of the game by practising it, they were flummoxed when a new visual feature was introduced. If they stayed out of any room, its door would start shrinking and eventually disappear.

They should have ignored those disappearing doors, but the students couldn’t. They wasted so many clicks rushing back to reopen doors that their earnings dropped 15 percent. Even when the penalties for switching grew stiffer — besides losing a click, the players had to pay a cash fee — the students kept losing money by frantically keeping all their doors open.

According to the report, what seemed to motivate was not the desire for future flexibility, but the pain of watching a door close.

“Closing a door on an option is experienced as a loss, and people are willing to pay a price to avoid the emotion of loss,” Dr. Ariely says. In the experiment, the price was easy to measure in lost cash. In life, the costs are less obvious — wasted time, missed opportunities. If you are afraid to drop any project at the office, you pay for it at home.

In my experience too, there is a lot of mental accounting that goes on just as the NYT says, and it takes real effort, or the words of a poet, to provide a consolidated view.

And because anywhere that the words diversity and complexity appear together Knackered Hack alerts go off, this is a treat for the weekend from a group called Hyannis Sound:-

Welcome to the Knackered Hack. If you're visiting in search of my paleo lunch with Black Swan author Nassim Taleb, you'll find it in three parts here. If you enjoy what you see don't forget to subscribe to the RSS feed. Alternatively, so you don't miss an important update and can more easily forward those salient posts to your friends and business contacts, sign up for my regular email service. You can follow me on Twitter by clicking here. Thanks for visiting!

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I’ve only seen a couple of mentions of this term on the internet, mainly derogatory comments aimed at my miscreant colleagues in the fourth estate, as if “garage” equalled “gutter”.

But I think “garage journalism” is a good name. We should rub it down, respray it and apply new transfers so that it can be re-used to describe the new emergent forms of journalism: citizen journalism, hyper-local journalism and the rest of small-unit production in the long tail.

Aside from what is happening on the web, I have personally been involved in some of this hyper-local journalism in recent years, but using old-fashioned print. Moreover, just last week I was excited to see examples of that same model being copied in an adjacent neighbourhood. We’re talking very small community magazines delivered for nothing door to door, produced by volunteers with the support of local business. Not about real-estate, but real life. When I walked into the Indian takeaway, the very young proprietor was insistent that I take a copy. Had one come through the door? he asked. It should have, but I should take one away anyway. Published by the local school, in partnership with small shops in the “city village”, I had not thought that the demographic would be attractive enough. But the businesses, Gawd bless ‘em, seem to have got behind it.

Eventually, I’m sure, the same crew that are putting it together will be able to develop local blog-based news, and, who knows?, maybe even a YouTube/BlipTV based TV channel that would cover the village fête and the combined schools expedition up the local high point. The magazine will seed that online local audience as it emerges and matures. And the fact that we are all filming ourselves doing things locally will make those things seem more important, and I suspect better supported by the community. The local will become even more salient. There is a widely reported Belgian community TV experiment I’m already aware, although it uses traditional cable, I think.

As the video below shows, the idea probably is not so new. It could be said to have its antecedents in the “country” newspapers of the US, where the producer of such micro-local news was perhaps a local printer, for whom publishing a local news sheet did not constitute a full living, and so this had to be supplemented with contract printing. It’s good for journalists to reflect that a fully-paid up salaried profession may not be the future, was not always the past and may not even be an accurate representation of the present any longer.

What struck me about this informational newsreel was the range of tasks the local publisher was required to have technical knowledge of, in contrast to his municipal counterpart. The point the film makes is that this type of publisher must know all aspects of his business to succeed: from reporting, gathering advertising, setting type to printing. To quote, about 8 mins in, contrasting the skills needed of this country newsman with his urban contemporary:-

All this knowledge and experience seems a great deal to ask of one man but he leads a happy life and takes pride in the fact that he is in business for himself.

The publisher of a city paper has the responsibility of running a large organization. His is a good position, and one you might do well to aim for.

These days the small-town publisher would be learning social media, digital photography/video, taxonomy and SEO, and probably worrying (like me) when, or if, he should get round to learning Ruby. How much to err toward the professionalism of Adobe? How much to plunge into the messy ingenuity of open source plug-ins?

Although blogging in some ways needs no more than a simple WordPress, Typepad or Blogspot account to get going, publishing is always bound to get more sophisticated as the experimental possibilities increase, and those of us who want to will start to tinker in search of something more presentable, goofy, entertaining, or even just as a self-distraction. It seems to me that a creative form of journalism now needs to be recognized that is akin to the garage inventor, the garage band, the 1930s sci-fi fanmags or ’70s punk fanzines. To the initiated, the concept of blogging lacks sufficient differentiation.

At least it goes some way to explain the head-scratching ‘hobby’ that hundreds of thousands of writers/publishers are going through either in search of their own satisfaction, to fulfil some community need, or find some elusive business model that starts the cash rolling in. I suspect a good many of us are a mixture of all three, and don’t know whether what will come out at the end will be a piece of fine Chippendale, or some ill-fitting shelving from which a much-prized objet (our reputation for level-headedness perhaps) will later become dislodged. As with any DIY project, it is not clear at the outset what one’s real level of skill is, how much it needs to expand, and whether it will be encouraged, admired or even tolerated by spouse and hungry family, let alone friends.

But, above all else, it seems very clear that, just as with ’60s tech, or ’70s punk, some delectable new flavours will ultimately bubble up from what might look from the wrong angle to be a rather unappetising stochastic soup.

Here is the video:

And just to pinch ourselves before we get too romantic about the charm of the local, go here to Wikipedia where you’ll find a clip of Peter Sellers adopting a similar narrative tone for comedic rather than documentary purposes to highlight a place, Bal-ham, where I was happy once to consider myself a resident. Gateway to the South, indeed.

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As I’ve touched on before, I’ve a self-justifying preference for the intermittent, irregular, and the archive in my blog-reading and -writing.

A while ago, I heard a claim from a New York Times executive that half their traffic came from Google, and that, therefore, they loved Google. Despite suggestions to the contrary, they did not see the search-engine-cum-advertising-vehicle as a threat. But that traffic dynamic is the same for everyone, I think. So what you have done in the past resonates today with 50% of your readers. Better make sure it’s reasonably good because today’s story is no longer tomorrow’s chip-wrappers. At the very least, make sure it is useful to you.

Vicki Baker’s new blog, while republishing one of my more regrettable drunken episodes, nevertheless inspired me with how blogs can be used in a way that the great humanist and empiricist thinkers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries would have approved. She quotes Robert Darnton in the New York Review of Books:-

Time was when readers kept commonplace books. Whenever they came across a pithy passage, they copied it into a notebook under an appropriate heading, adding observations made in the course of daily life. Erasmus instructed them how to do it… The practice spread everywhere in early modern England, among ordinary readers as well as famous writers like Francis Bacon, Ben Jonson, John Milton, and John Locke. It involved a special way of taking in the printed word. Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end, early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks.”

In the end, that is more than enough justification to blog, and it was certainly partly how I conceived my first blog Not that I’m Biased (lost temporarily in a Blogspot vortex), and archived at the back end of this blog, for safety’s sake. I need to index those posts into a category and tag them perhaps, as they documented my thinking from 2004 to 2006-ish. By the way, I blushed a bit when I looked again at some of them last year. But they read now much better after the credit crunch .

Vicki’s a bit of a Kino fan too. And has blogged here more extensively than I have yet on the phenomenon that was Viktor Tsoi. I invite other bloggers to join the meme. Together we can defeat those evil machines!

As a footnote, Milton’s commonplace journal is currently on display at the British Library.

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It could be prescience, but highlighting Grant Washburn’s expression only a couple of weeks ago about the oppressive effect of successive waves on the wiped-out surfer, has turned into some real, personal truth.

In my earliest days as a practising journalist, electronic reporting did not allow for much in the way of bylines. Then we decided to go interactive and put names and phone numbers on every story (people did not have email back then). I still prefer the kind of journalistic group anonymity favoured by The Economist, though it must be said that more recently it has been retreating from that style.

The self-disclosure encouraged by blogging is still something that I’m not totally comfortable with, although the experiment seems necessary. Facebook, compared with MySpace, actively invites us to say who we really are. And indeed, it helped a cousin contact me only the other day to express condolences.

Only a few weeks ago, by way of explaining an absence from blogging (or “a worryingly long apple harvest” as Michael, one of my good friends, described it - because my last post had been about an over-enthusiastic seasonal fruit display at the Bath Farmers’ Market), I disclosed the death of my father. I was going to remain silent on the subject of my brother’s sudden demise, which took me off to Ohio last week. But it seems inconsistent.

Those awaiting more Kino pictures will understand why I still have not produced any. And those who have contacted me in that regard will understand the silence. It was indeed odd to be focusing on the loss of Viktor Tsoy and then to be suddenly brought up short by a more tangible bereavement.

The death of two family members in three months (and three if one includes my great aunt), is devastating in an obvious way: an archetypal double whammy, I guess. But I am also struck that such losses are much easier to narrate than some that I and others will have suffered, where the complexity and invisibility of the experience mean that it is beyond ready comprehension or sympathy. I have an intension to write about those other losses at some point in the future - possibly through the blog, possibly through some other medium.

Meanwhile, I’ve had to write and deliver two eulogies in quick succession - something I could not say I was comfortable having to do. It can be tricky enough dealing with one’s own loss without having to contextualise it adequately for others.

But the title of the post is to focus on that sinking (or even floating) feeling a surfer experiences when plunged beneath a wave that is completely overpowering. One is out of one’s element. There is an eerie silence, a numbness, and a not-knowingness of which way up is.

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I try not to write on events in anything like real time. Think of it as a contrarian posture of a blogger who spent 15 years in newswires. But yesterday’s reporting on the intimidation of British Council officials in Russia cuts conveniently into my current Russian reveries. It also highlights, in a small way, what I learned at a seminar I attended on Wednesday at University College London.

The kind people at UCL let unaffiliated roughnecks like me in for free at the London Judgement and Decision Making Group meetings. Terry Connolly, Eller Professor of Management and Organizations at the University of Arizona, was talking about Regret and the Perils of Decisional Improvement. His themes are some that I’ll return to in coming weeks, I hope, because regrets (you guessed it), I’ve had a few.

When I was a student (and briefly after) I confess that I did occasionally wear bow ties. Once I’d figured out how to tie the pesky things, it was a badge of honour. With someone of my social background it represented a bit of cheap sophistication. But bow ties don’t really work in the rough and tumble of a Fleet Street newsroom. So pretty soon after I started work I stopped wearing them. I still have most of the tweedy garb from that period, and it allows me to go to fancy dress parties and pretend to be Mr Toad. There are some bow-tie-wearing journalists around still, and you can learn more about their bad temper here, and how they hacked off the hack (though not really) here.

This is the story of the first bow tie I ever owned and how I parted company with it, overcoming the kind of “regret salience” that Prof Connolly describes. Continue reading ‘cultural ties’

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