That seems to be the conclusion that the Grey Lady wants us to draw from this bizarre story:
SAN FRANCISCO — They work long hours, often to exhaustion. Many are paid by the piece — not garments, but blog posts. This is the digital-era sweatshop. You may know it by a different name: home.
A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment.
Of course, the bloggers can work elsewhere, and they profess a love of the nonstop action and perhaps the chance to create a global media outlet without a major up-front investment. At the same time, some are starting to wonder if something has gone very wrong. In the last few months, two among their ranks have died suddenly.
Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December.
Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.
To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. There is also no certainty that the stress of the work contributed to their deaths. But friends and family of the deceased, and fellow information workers, say those deaths have them thinking about the dangers of their work style.
Not surprisingly, the story is generating quite a bit of commentary.
See-Dubya says that, rather than being stressful, blogging can be therapeutic:
Actually, blogging is kind of therapeutic. Especially when you’re a red-state person living in a blue, blue state, and your neighbors would burn a peace symbol in your yard at midnight if they knew how you really felt about things. Some people do yoga; I pound the keyboard. The blood pressure goes down either way.
Helen Smith, the Insta-wife quips:
Funny, I had a heart attack before I started blogging. Now I am fine. Coincidence? I think not.
And Robert Stacey McCain finds the humor in it all:
Let’s see, Wal-Mart is evil because it sells stuff cheap and isn’t unionized, and Starbucks is evil because it sells expensive coffee and isn’t unionized. The pattern of New York Times-disapproved capitalist exploitation is clear. Obviously, there can be only one solution to The Blog Crisis:
BLOGGERS of the WORLD UNITE!
You have nothing to lose
. . . but your pajamas!This message paid for by the International Amalgamated Blogworkers Guild, Local 374.
Heh.
I tend to fall into the blogging as therapeutic category as well. For me, blogging is really just a 21st Century extension of something that I’ve enjoyed since high school — keeping up with politics and world events and talking about them. Today, instead of an audience of one or two people, the whole world is watching.
H/T: James Joyner
April 6th, 2008 at 1:21 pm
People are getting paid to blog? Is this like professional athletes? Then I guess the next we will be hearing about will be bloggers on steroids.
Here is a “serious” thought. The people at the top of the news business must push themselves harder than anyone else — or they must be cheating (e.g., taking steroids). I wonder what the clowns who write that silly stuff for the Grey Lady are taking.
April 6th, 2008 at 1:37 pm
Writers Blog Till They Drop…
But would it be less stressful than in their homes, with their families, and where they can eat when they want, sleep when they are tired, don’t have to commute to work, etc….