Archive for the 'Sociology' Category

Blogging and Work-Life Balance in a Digital World

Published
by
Taylor
on April 9, 2008
in Blogging, Careers, Culture, Health and Sociology
. Comments

blogstressA recent NY Times article is (predictably) getting a lot of attention in the blogosphere.  The article uses the deaths of two bloggers (and a heart attack suffered by a third) to wonder aloud whether blogging as a profession carries inherent stress that causes folks to blog themselves to death:

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.

John Batelle wonders what the fuss is about: after all, in any profession there will be those who unfortunately work themselves to the brink of personal collapse.  Just because blogging is a relatively new profession doesn’t mean that we should be any more shocked than we are are by, say, a lawyer who works him or herself to death.  But in a comment on Batelle’s post,  reader JG offers a  great and thoughtful response (I encourage you to read the whole thing; emphasis mine):

Even people who work themselves to death in their offices, late into the night, eating bad take-out, had [sic] to leave their offices at some point. In order to go home, they have to walk outside, catch some fresh air, walk up or down a couple of stairs to get to the subway. That travel period gives them a modicum of real contact with real people. A nod. Maybe sometimes even a smile. An eye-flick of recognition from the newspaper vendor on the corner. Those small things are sustaining, life-affirming, human. And those things, no matter how small, do help reduce stress.

The internet changes that. Again, this is what we have to admit to ourselves that we believe. The internet makes things different. Yes, we’d like all of it to be different-better. But sometimes it is different-worse. And one way it could very well be different-worse is that blogging for a living, from home, means you lose all those little moments of human contact, of a little bit of exercise, of a little bit of fresh air.

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Monday Links: April 7, 2008

Published
by
Taylor
on April 7, 2008
in Advertising, Business, Cooking, Design, Energy, Environment, Health, Monday Links, Philanthropy, Sociology and Sustainability
. Comments

Sorry for the delay in posting these links, folks. I’ve been traveling, and I’m just now getting back to bloggin’. Unlike some people, I’m determined to make it through the 826 unread items in my Google Reader. How about a few links?

Although common tracking systems, known as cookies, have counted a consumer’s visits to a network of sites, the new monitoring, known as “deep-packet inspection,” enables a far wider view — every Web page visited, every e-mail sent and every search entered. Every bit of data is divided into packets — like electronic envelopes — that the system can access and analyze for content

  • This Nick Kristof column on racial and gender bias provides links to a number of interesting online psychological tests.
  • PhilanTopic highlights a Gates Foundation initiative aimed at involving scientists who might not normally focus on global health issues, particularly those in the developing world or in complimentary disciplines. From the Gates site:

The initiative is modeled after the grand challenges formulated more than 100 years ago by mathematician David Hilbert. His list of important unsolved problems has encouraged innovation in mathematics research ever since. Similarly, the Grand Challenges in Global Health initiative aims to engage creative minds from across scientific disciplines — including those who have not traditionally taken part in global health research — to work on 14 major challenges.

  • Smitten Kitchen is my new favorite food/cooking blog. This lemon blueberry yogurt cake looks amazing (due in no small part to their expert photography…and baking).
  • If you’re looking to spice up an office memo, or maybe a senior thesis, try the beard font.

That should be enough for now. Sorry to fill the links with so much random stuff, but expect more *ahem* serious blogging to follow this week.

Suburban Life In Perspective

Published
by
Taylor
on April 4, 2008
in Culture, Energy, Environment and Sociology
. Comments

I can’t call this a “money quote,” but it might qualify as a “mind-numbing quote.” Via NPR:suburbs

The average Atlanta resident with a job drives 66 miles every day. In fact, people here drive so much that if you added up every commute and every trip to a store or soccer practice on just one day, you’d get a number that’s larger than the distance between the Earth and the sun

Still with me? Does this not strike everyone as profoundly disturbing and yet–if you’ve ever driven through metro Atlanta–possibly a conservative estimate? Morning Edition featured a two-part series this week called “Life in the ‘Burbs,” detailing the environmental costs of American dreams involving jobs in high-rises miles away from bucolic suburban homesteads (these people work for NPR, so don’t assume for a second that they didn’t consider how many folks listen to the show during their morning commute).

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Give Big: How Giving $10 Is Like Giving $100,000

Published
by
a Guest
on March 27, 2008
in Philanthropy and Sociology
. Comments

The following guest post was written by Christy Moss, a writer and fundraiser for the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois.   Christy is passionate about encouraging a spirit of philanthropy among her peers.  Her favorite non-profits include National Public Radio, Kiva, public libraries, and Greenville College, her alma mater.

pennies.jpgThrough her show The Big Give, Oprah seeks to change the way we view giving. While most of us already agree with her pay-it-forward style of philanthropy, it is a bit more difficult to connect with contestants giving away $100,000, when $10 is all we have to give. Don’t be discouraged! I am here to help you realize that $10 is a significant start – and that giving away $10 is more like giving away $100,000 than you realize.

Forget the Numbers

“Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.” – Helen Keller

Did you see the Easter episode of the Big Give? Contestants were challenged to give away $100,000 in 24 hours. One contestant was actually paralyzed by the amount she had to give away. And only one contestant was able to give away all $100,000. Numbers can be crippling. Whether your gift is large or small, $10 or $10,000, giving is an act of the heart, not the act of a calculator. Don’t be discouraged by starting small. You may feel your gift is insignificant, but what if everyone who made $10 gifts felt the same way? Your gift, combined with the gifts of countless others, do make a substantial difference.

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Addicted to Information, or Wired For It?

Published
by
Jarred
on March 18, 2008
in Culture, Science and Sociology
. Comments

In Tropophilia’s first guest post, Dan wrote about information saturation in our increasingly connected world:

Will we ever reach a point in which our desire for information, for advances in technology, science, medicine, etc. is quenched, where the demand weakens, and the bubble bursts? It seems that an ever-increasing demand for knowledge has fueled, since the beginning of time, most of our scientific and technological advances. And at the beginning, our needs necessitated these advances. But have we, or will we ever reach a point when our daily lives have no direct needs that can’t be satisfied by previously existing knowledge? What do we need to know now, that we didn’t know before, to help us be better humans or citizens?

Interesting questions indeed, and it seems that Dan hasn’t been the only one posing them.  In his “Portals” column for the Wall Street Journal, Lee Gomes wrote last week about how human beings are more or less “wired” to consume endless amounts of information.

Gomes cites a study where researchers found “increased production of the brain’s pleasure-enhancing neurotransmitters called opioids” when test subjects were shown certain images.  Those images were determined to contain more processable information than others, and so a correlation arose between the consumption of information and pleasure experienced by the brain.  As lead researcher Dr. Irving Biederman put it:

When you find new information, you get an opioid hit, and we are junkies for those. You might call us ‘infovores.’

So it appears we crave information just like we crave food.  But as Dan asked, doesn’t basic economic theory tell us that “every market can reach a point in which demand is decreased due to abundant availability”?  Why doesn’t our demand for information decrease as the scarcity of information decreases?

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