Digital hoarding (also known as e-hoarding) is excessive acquisition and reluctance to delete electronic material no longer valuable to the user. The behavior includes the mass storage of digital artifacts and the retainment of unnecessary or irrelevant electronic data. The term is increasingly common in pop culture, used to describe the habitual characteristics of compulsive hoarding, but in cyberspace. As with physical space in which excess items are described as "clutter" or "junk," excess digital media is often referred to as "digital clutter."
Contents
Virtual spaces
Digital hoarding occurs in any electronic spaces where information is stored. These are common areas where digital clutter may exist:
A cluttered email inbox arises when a user does not have a system for archiving some messages and deleting others that are no longer wanted. Electronic documents can become clutter if a user does not delete extraneous files, or if the files are poorly organized (e.g. inconsistent folder structure, empty folders).
Some social media platforms also provide opportunity for digital hoarding. On the social networking site Facebook, for example, one can accumulate a vast number of “friends” that may merely be acquaintances or lapsed contacts. Groups and Pages can also contribute to clutter when users join and like new ones, respectively, without leaving or unfollowing those in which they are no longer interested.
Causes
Digital hoarding stems from a variety of individual traits and habits, corporate conditions, and societal trends:
Repercussions
Digital hoarding can lead to many problems:
In the media
Many American documentary television series depict the struggles of compulsive hoarders, such as "Hoarding: Buried Alive" on TLC and "Hoarders" on A&E. These shows have popularized awareness of hoarding, showing the consequences of accumulating clutter. However, these programs usually focus on physical hoarding. The WPTV story of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, resident Larry Fisher is a notable exception. This program focused on digital hoarding, depicting Fisher's longstanding refusal to delete any digital content. Instead, Fisher purchased an additional computer every time he ran out of hard drive space. The BBC News story of Washington, D.C., resident Chris Yurista expresses a counterpoint to this perspective. The program portrayed Yurista as a "21st century minimalist" for living with hardly any physical assets, substituting digital goods wherever possible.
Criticism
Though digital hoarding is often given a negative connotation, some counter that it is not an unhealthy or detrimental practice. One argument states that a large amount of digital content is not a problem in itself; rather, the problem is content findability. The size of the World Wide Web illustrates this point: a vast amount of content is available, but search engines such as Google have mastered effective algorithms for instantaneous findability. Digital hoarding can also be logical for email correspondence. Businesses often use email as the primary form of communication, so deleting conversations and documents that seem unimportant could be problematic if they are needed later. Disk storage is increasingly abundant and inexpensive, so concern over the cost of digital hoarding is rarely necessary. In addition, digital hoarding is clearly more benign than physical hoarding, which is more visible and takes up physical space. Finally, on a subjective level, digital hoarding can hardly be viewed as problematic if the consumer simply does not feel burdened by their collection of digital data.