Insomniacs, the Phantoms of the Internet

theodp writes "Ever since she was a toddler, freelance writer Lily Burana has been a Stay Up Late kind of girl. When her kindergarten teacher asked students 'What time do you go to bed?,' young Lily felt compelled to lie rather than rat out her own mother by saying, 'Oh, between midnight and 1 a.m.' She still suffers from insomnia, but has discovered that Facebook is the Promised Land for the awake and alone. She finds comfort in the company of others who, like her, live counter to the conventional rhythm of a sunny-day world."

Comments

Time Zones

[Anonymous Coward]

Once forums, IRC channels, and other websites that are driven by user-created content reach a certain size, there is no longer a difference between "daytime" and "night time" because while Americans slumber, Europeans are waking up, and Australians are coming home from work. "Peak" time ceases to mean anything once you're factoring in physical location and have at least two "peak" times. You use the same forum as others, but probably know different mods, OPs, and key players.

It is important that the Internet hang-out be user-driven, because groups who select content to publish tend to originate in geographic proximity, and a single time zone becomes favored.

Facebook isn't a place where it's easy to intrude on a social network in a geographical location outside your own, so I don't understand why the author isn't using a broader term.

Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome is the right word

[MichaelCrawford]

Wikipedia has a good article on Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome.

As I write this, I am at work at 11:30 PM. I got to work at 8:00 PM. When my coworkers come in in the morning, I'll be heading home to sleep.

I have been this way for as long as I have had conscious memory. My mother tells me that I have been this way since I was a newborn in the hospital.

Lots of treatments have been proposed with many studies being done, some with thousands of test subjects. Not one single treatment has ever been demonstrated to work in a statistically significant way.

Thus the best advice that the medical community can give us "Night Owls" is to find some way to accomodate it. That's why I took up computer programming in the first place. My degree is in Physics, but I'm afraid that teaching morning classes just doesn't work for me.

I have lots of friends who have DSPS as well. I met most of them by hanging out at Dennys at three in the morning.

One Step Further

[McBeer]

conventional rhythm of a sunny-day world

My problem goes a step further. I like to stay awake for 20 hours and then sleep for like 10. I spend the same amount of my life sleeping/awake as a normal person, just in longer chunks. Trouble is, left to my own devices, I effectively "stay up" 4 hours later each night untill I wrap back around. Before I had a job I could actually live like that. It was kind of a strange sensation brushing my teeth with my roommate at midnight; She was going to bed, i just got up.