Methinks this article from the NYTimes is a tad hysterical:
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.
1) It doesn't sound like the issue in these deaths was too much blogging. It sounds like it was too little exercise.
2) If you are blogging so much that you're stressed out, there is a super-simple solution: unplug.
3) "Digital era sweatshop"? Really. That is the comparison you are going to make. Writing about the news and working fourteen hours in a Thai factory making pants for the Gap.
Yeah, you do feel the pressure to write something everyday and the news cycle can be troublesome, but it sounds like some people are taking blogging far too seriously.
I have a policy that keeps me sane through this thing. Never blog on the weekends, and when it makes me nuts I take a week off. I recommend that others indulge in similar policies.
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Oh, hell, you mean blogging isn't going to make me immortal?
The logic is priceless:
A. Dude 1 blogs
B. Dude 1 just died from a massive coronary
Then:
C. Blogging causes massive coronaries.
Beware, red meat. You have an imposing nemesis in the form of a laptop computer.
But sometimes poor bloggers don't even get paid. They just swindle co-bloggers into taking them out for drinks.
While perhaps the tone of this article is a bit sensationalistic, the underlying content is pretty accurate.
I worked as a professional technology blogger for 4 years to pay my bills, and now I hardly blog at all? Why? In the industry, we call it blogger burnout. The reality is that it does take an inordinate amount of time and energy to keep up on things. Blogging is a 24 hour job, there is no office to leave, no time when you can really not have to worry about keeping up. Eventually I just crashed and burned, quit my job, and cut off most of my contact with the internet for 2 months I just couldn't keep up with it all.
I think what we have to keep in mind that there is more than one kind of blogging. There's blogging for fun or as a side thing, and then there is blogging as a 24 hour job that takes a pretty hefty toll on one's mental energy.
I have gotten immensely stressed from running a blog. I have since stopped blogging because it exacerbated my already-present stress...and I wasn't even doing it for pay (read: no deadlines). Laugh if you want, but blogging can certainly be associated with stress-related death for anybody who is obsessive about it or does it for a living. And as the article explains, and as I know from personal experience, you sometimes can't unplug because the Internet IS that fast, and information overload is a definite issue.
This is an interesting social causation of disease question. Does the behavior of blogging cause increased likelihood of early mortality. No one has systematically studied this but it could be done with a longitudinal study linked to mortality data. The question is what are the covariants? Is education a plus or a minus effect and what about income, marital status and age, weight and smoking/drinking behaviors of bloggers--do bloggers, because they blog, have to drink more to remain sane.
All good questions--I wonder if the NIH has a grant process for that?