Bogged to death in digital era sweatshops

THE MODERN HOME OFFICES of today’s boggers are in fact “digital era sweatshops”, where exhausted, undernourished treadmill workers slave over never ending streams of news articles and posts, just to make ends meet. Or so the New York Times would have you believe.

In an article published yesterday, the New York Times takes the fact that two relatively well known bloggers have recently kicked the virtual bucket, and choose to logically (?) attribute these deaths to the stress of their jobs. Ok, well, the story does not actually go as far as pinning the untimely deaths of tech bloggers Russell Shaw and Marc Orchant (or Om Malik's recent nonfatal coronary) directly on blogging, admitting that other factors may have been involved, however, the fact is more than strongly implied (headline: “Writers Blog till they Drop”).

The NY Times melodramatically reports on the dire conditions of bloggers “toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment”, as if their plight were in any way similar to five year old Indian children put to work for 20 hours a day in clothes factories in squalid and horrific conditions. The fact that none of the stressed out bloggers are actually forced to blog is, for the most part, glossed over and swept aside.

Apparently, bloggers suffer from “weight loss or gain” (two things relatively unheard of outside of blogging circles?), “sleep disorders” and “exhaustion” (possibly as a result of the sleep disorder) and “other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on”. These “other maladies” are left to our imagination.

In alarmist fashion, the New York Times decries the fact that these under or over weighted, insomniac, well to lucratively paid bloggers hardly even leave the house anymore, such is the burden of an office “only a click away”.

A cushy job working from the comforts of home where, for the most part, people decide on their own hours, when they take their breaks and holidays, and get well paid for work they love doing? If the think that this is what a sweatshop is like, it really is living in a virtual reality. µ

L’Inq
New York Times