Death by blogging in the digital sweatshop

The New York Times has published an interesting piece about blog-related stress. The drive to constantly publish new material for lucrative gain has been enough to already cause serious medical problems and even death among some bloggers.

That just ain't healthy, by any measure.

Many years ago (like when I was a teenager) I had a friend who told me something that's become so prophetic, it's absolutely frightening in its accuracy: the "information era", he told me, would soon become something dominated more by information than by people. To the point that information would become like a god that people would be sacrificing every precious moment of their lives toward satiating. And I think I understood enough of what he was saying back then to be legitimately scared about it.

That's why The Knight Shift isn't my bread and butter, and I don't particularly care for it to become that either. It's just a hobby. I only post about subjects that I find interesting or "cool", and my own personal ruminations. I'm not expecting those to fetch top dollar anyway because, hey, I already know that I can't spin a party line like the pros. This is just my lil' corner of the web: my personal "message in a bottle" for whoever might find it. And given how many neat people I've met because of it, so far I think it's been a great success.

Anyhoo, there ya go: absent an official warning from the Surgeon General (do Surgeons General even make warnings like that anymore?), don't let yer blog dispatch you to "the choir invisible" :-)

Categories: blog, health, internet, medicine, technology