Thursday, January 27, 2005

Blog Launch

The viewpoint here will be more like from mission control (alluding to NASA's historic base of operations in Houston, Texas), although the blog's title is also an allusion to TV-style newsroom control rooms, specifically that one in Control Room, the movie/documentary about Al Jazeera at the time of the ill-conceived and badly managed neocon attack on Iraq (a situation we're still working to salvage even as I write this).

You also find this control room motif in other genres, such as "the war room" in various military channel movies. Civilians have their "situation rooms" and in a world game context, such as here, control rooms have everything to do with monitoring ecosystems and associated field operations, especially those undertaken by technology and knowledge workers tasked with keeping systems humming aboard Spaceship Earth -- reducing entropy, solving problems.

Such control rooms show up on geek channels a lot, with the distinction between geek and military channels sometimes blurred, other times in sharp contrast owing to differences in training and outlook.