Sunday, April 06, 2008

NYT: Blogging may cause sleep disorders, bloating, death

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!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Some punctuation and emphasis added. Full story here.

4 comments:

Steve Muhlberger said...

Just sitting at a desk for years on end is going to have severe effects eventually, as I found out two years ago.

Dr. Virago said...

MSM pieces on blogging crack me up. Thanks for the tag-cloud style fonts emphasizing the "see, we told you blogging was the end of the world as we know it" element. Yeah, like being a MSM journalist isn't at *all* stressful.

Steve Muhlberger said...

It is interesting that I never ran into an intermediate article between the usual "bloggers are nuts with too much time on their hands" and this "bloggers are intellectual sweatshop victims who are working themselves to death."

I wonder what that article would say?

Jennifer Lynn Jordan said...

(panics, stops blogging forever, in fact works at reverting to illiteracy)