Is blogging hazardous to your health? According to a recent article in the New York Times entitled In Web World of 24/7 Stress, Writers Blog Till They Drop, the answer is yes. Matt Richtel, the author of the article, cites the following examples:
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.
The article concentrates on professional bloggers, some of whom get paid as little as $10 a post. For people who try to eak out an existence in the blogosphere by staying one step ahead of the competition, I’m sure the pressure is enormous.
But I think that amateurs like myself can also suffer as a result of overblogging. For me, the stress is two-fold:
1) Editing, re-editing, and re-re-editing my work. Wanting to put out a letter-perfect product, I spend much more time than I should agonizing over le mot juste. Maybe it’s my academic and paralegal background, but for me, attention to detail is not only a virtue, it’s an absolute necessity. I envy people who can blog as fast as their typing speed will allow and then hit the publish button without remorse, but if I don’t dwell on whether I’ve put in too many (or too few) commas or whether I should use a semicolon or a period, I feel I’m doing my readers a disservice. For example, I’m still not sure whether it’s “eak out” or “eake out” – and that’s still driving me nuts!
2) Comments. I welcome thoughtful critiques of what I’ve written, but nothing raises my blood pressure more than a comment that’s poorly thought out, abusive, or ad hominem in nature. I’ve always been of the opinion that people can disagree without being disagreeable. But when tempers flare, it’s probably best to agree to disagree and end the thread. My biggest problem is that I assume that if I just couch my argument another way, use another approach or find better examples, the other person will finally see my point of view. I guess I’m just a cockeyed optimist in that regard. Too many people (myself included sometimes) don’t want to engage in the pulling and hauling that lead to what Hegel calls thesis, antithesis and ultimately the synthesis of a new point of view. I don’t mind people politely declining to engage, but if they call me names or fabricate things about me out of whole cloth, that really gets up my ire.
Given the monetary compensation I get for blogging ($0.00 to date), you’d think I’d cut way back and find another hobby that’s less stressful. I guess it must be my ego; there’s something exhilirating about seeing your own words in print for the whole world to see. Unfortunately, there are more than enough people who don’t share that enthusiasm and have no qualms about telling me so in no uncertain terms.
I don’t mind people politely declining to engage, but if they call me names or fabricate things about me out of whole cloth, that really gets up my ire.
I knew it was only a matter of time.
http://www.haloscan.com/comments/panhandletruthsquad/6436139092208214043/#410334
You have hit many nails on the head here. I could add a yard and cars going to crap. Neglected family. Money burned when I could be doing overtime, money burned paying someone to do what I could have done myself. Lots of reasons to add to those above.
You may have noticed I’ve cut way back. As in your link to PTS it, and I, am/are just spinning wheels. I finally read the storm front posts dumass linked to. Some is mine, but apparantly someone has been able to edit some of my stuff, and some is direct from here. I still have friends there that are looking into it.
Point is PTS folks are a waste. They lie ignore comment from a totally biased position aand it seems even hack posts somehow. Not being a computer wiz I don’t know how that is done. Doesn’t matter anyway.
But I think I am going to back out of this a bit, or alot. There are to many real world things to do that may makee a bigger diff.
I’ll still be commenting time to time but not posting much.
Funny thing I learned recently though. Even though Clint supports virtual child porn he claims to not be interested.
Then he claims to be at a peaak of somekindd in a field that would allow him to do succh things as create virt CP.
In no way thinking of that,I had recently investigated “Second Life.” It has made much news lately in various legal battles over proprietary creations and is even mentioned on various tv and talk shows. Well I spent a few days poking around and guess what? There are Virt CP areas as well as every type of porn imaginable in this world. I wonder if Clint is somewhere in there chasing little girls on two wheels?
Interesting comment, celtictexan.
The internet in general and the blogosphere in particular have blurred the line between fantasy and reality to an enormous extent. One classic example of this is the phenomenon of the “sockpuppet” (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_sock_puppet).
Another recent example is when Think Progress accused John McCain of plagiarizing a 1996 speech by Admiral Timothy Ziemer. It was later discovered that McCain actually gave the original speech at least a year before Ziemer. Think Progress claimed they had exercised due diligence by conducting Google and Nexis searches, as if nothing exists outside of cyberspace. (BTW, the speech was posted on McCain’s Senate site, but allegedly didn’t show up in TP’s searches).
Here’s a link to the post:
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/03/27/mccain-plagiarism/
Comment #150 puts it well: “Absense of evidence is not evidence of absense.”
This blurred line of reality has spilled over beyond the virtual world, too. Back on November 17, 2006, I wrote the following:
“In a world where fiction poses as non-fiction (e.g. A Million Little Pieces by James Frey) and now apparently non-fiction poses as fiction (e.g. If I Did It by O.J. Simpson), everyone needs to exercise a little healthy skepticism, no matter how much a story fits into your world view.”
As to whether “Clint is somewhere in there chasing little girls on two wheels,” I’ve decided to give up altogether trying to speculate what goes on in a person’s mind, let alone what they might or might not be doing in the virtual world.