Death By Blogging

Wesleying is a fairly laid-back blog. Certainly there’s no Nick Denton-type slave-driver, and I doubt there are any posters here resorting to serious coke and Adderall habits in order to deal with the immense pressure of posting emailed events and quirky anecdotes about this place.

But blogging can apparently get pretty serious, as in the case of two prolific bloggers who died recently of stress-related heart problems:

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… 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… But friends and family of the deceased, and fellow information workers, say those deaths have them thinking about the dangers of their work style.

Possibly a good thing then that there’s no financial incentive here, and if anyone on Wesleying is losing sleep over the blog it is purely out of their genuine concern for the student body’s awareness of Wesleyan’s grueling 24/7 news cycle.

Full article: In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop