NEW YORK - A recent ad for the Windows CE operating system pictured a young woman in a crowded airport, heading for a plane in a blur of determination, booting up her palm PDA as she jogged through the terminal.
The image was cheerfully captioned, "Turns downtime into uptime, anytime!"
With high-tech pitchmeisters training a bead on what little downtime we have left, it's no wonder we're pounding the Prozac. Stress has become one of our grossest national products -- and Americans are spending US$1 billion a year on books that purport to tell them how to manage it, according to Stress Inc., a new Web site created by 21 graduate students at Columbia University School of Journalism's Center for New Media.
Each year, the center's students launch a Web site that explores a single topic in depth. Last year, NYC24 served up a day in the life of the Big Apple. This year's topic was the grassroots favorite among the students, says associate professor Sreenath Sreenivasan.
"They picked this topic because they felt that stress so affects them, as journalists, and as computer users, " Sreenivasan explains. He adds that publishing an inquiry into what the site calls "the commerce of coping" seemed especially appropriate on the Net because "they felt it was an irony to cover stress using a medium that causes so much of it."
Stress Inc. addresses a broad range of angst-related subjects, from the growth of the antistress pharmaceutical industry (currently a $2.3 billion-a-year world market, according to the site) to a visit to a chic "power yoga" workshop in Manhattan, complete with om-ing in RealAudio.
A timeline of the evolution of stress as a modern phenomenon begins with the publication of Hans Selye's The Stress of Life in 1956. While some of the events pegged on the "History of Stress" timeline are obviously appropriate (such as the introduction of Zoloft, the launch of the relaxation-tape industry, and one of the first massacre-suicides by an unhinged mail carrier), others -- such as the landing of astronauts on the moon -- seem only marginally related to the subject at hand.
If you wondered whether the seemingly endless news items of former employees "going postal" were figments of media bloodlust, a report by Tom Karlo informs you that the US Labor Department recorded 123 on-the-job murders in 1997 -- the highest number ever. Erin Joyce profiles those who relieve others' stress for a living, such as a "Blue Light Flotation" therapist who charges $50 an hour to chill out in a tank of Epsom salt solution. All told, says MarketData Enterprises, stress-related absenteeism at work costs US industry $150 billion dollars a year.
Stress Inc. also offers more uplifting fare, such as a Shockwave cartoon that allows the user to subject a cowlicked Everyman named Bob to the various ordeals of modern life, from impotency to winning the lottery.
Pamela Parker, co-executive editor of the project, says the site is proof that students in the well-regarded program are making the most of the new tools available to them, and are "winning over the newspaper-oriented leadership" on the Columbia faculty.
"For the 22-year-olds in our class ... the Web is their home territory," she says. "They want to be able to use all the different media. The Web allows a reporter to bring out more aspects of the story."
The generation of reporters coming out of journalism school have a "pioneering mentality," Parker observes. "We're not afraid of technology. We can think in more than one dimension, more than just words."
Larry D. Rosen, whose book TechnoStress: Coping with Technology @Work @Home @Play might be considered to belong to the industry the site critiques, found himself a little stressed-out by a "lack of solutions" offered on Stress Inc.
"This is National Stress Month," Rosen says, "and there are hundreds of sites out there that give you access to discussion groups, advice, and helpful links. This didn't seem to do any of that."
Though Rosen found the site's skepticism about the boom in coping strategies to be "informationally interesting," he says he would have appreciated a stronger mission statement and a more straightforward interface.
Sreenivasan says he's proud of his reporters-in-training for building such an in-depth site in just six weeks.
"We tell the students, 'You're a start-up company with 21 employees.' We put a lot of pressure on them," Sreenivasan admits. "We expect everything that we expect from our print students, plus the graphics and more.... There's a reason they're so interested in stress."
