If blogging doesn’t kill you, does it makes you grateful?
Posted by austin under Blogging
Aside from the light hearted April fools day blog posts circulating the web, a so called serious media outlet reported on the dangers of blogging with this gem of an article that appeared in the New York Times this weekend. The article gives us dire warnings that bloggers can kill themselves with the stress of writing posts.
Check out Marc Andreessen’s headlines that could just as easily been used for this stupid article.
Mathew Ingram does a good round up of the discussion about the article.
I find it ridiculously stupid to equate writing blog posts to digital-era sweatshops.
Comparing the luxury of sitting behind a computer screen writing for fame or fortune (no matter how badly one may pursue this) with the daily work that billions of people do to barely be able to feed themselves is shallow. Most of these people work to survive while doing truly horrendous, dangerous and labour intensive jobs and don’t wine about not having time for TV, Xbox 360 or being scooped by Valleywag.
I also find it amusing that most of the examples in the article are actually about entrepreneurs trying to build their Hearst inspired mini-ME-dia empires while searching for their own special rosebud. People work hard at startups, and if you join a media startup to write content then yes - you are on a treadmill to deliver.
Any job can be stressful, but if you don’t love what you are doing and realize how lucky we are to be participating in the upper echelons of privileged society (Western industrialized culture with the many opportunities that Freedom, Capitalism and Education provide us) then a reality check is in order.
Many of us blog because we enjoy it, it’s fun. While I stress about startups I’m involved in at times as well - I really wouldn’t want to be doing much else and consider myself lucky to be in the game having fun still after all these years.
Illustration by http://www.asafhanuka.com
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