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Digital hoarding (also known as e-hoarding, e-clutter, data hoarding,digital pack-rattery or cyber hoarding) is defined by researchers as an emerging sub-type of hoarding disorder characterized by individuals collecting excessive digital material which leads to those individuals experiencing stress and disorganization. [1] Digital hoarding takes place in electronic environments where information is stored digitally. The term gained popularity among online forums and in the media before receiving scholarly attention. [2] Research indicates there may be correlation between individuals who exhibit physical and digital hoarding behaviors [3] [4] [5] and acknowledges there is a lack of psychological literature on the subject. [5]
Several studies suggest the main influential factors of digital hoarding are related to a number of issues and personal reasons which includes reduced costs for storing data, individuals lacking time to curate accumulated data, the perceived lifespan of data and emotional attachment to digital assets. The studies conducted to examine digital hoarding are limited in scope as this is an emerging area of study. There is a lack of agreement among researchers about whether digital hoarding is a condition to be treated rather than a normal human activity. [6]
The term data hoarding is also used to describe the (non-pathological) archiving of large amounts of data that might otherwise be lost, such as old video games and websites.
The limited studies published that focus on examining digital hoarding behavior identified the following influential factors as having significant impact on an individual's decision to accumulate digital material:
Researchers cite the following developments in technology as playing a role in enabling the increased accumulation of digital material:
The increasing availability of digital materials coincides with increased opportunity for people to accumulate digital materials. Van Bennekom et al. introduced "digital hoarding" in scientific literature in 2015 after reading descriptions of it published on the Internet by both patients and professionals. They define it as "the accumulation of digital files to the point of loss of perspective, which eventually results in stress and disorganization." [1] Since the publication of this case study, several attempts have been made to study digital hoarding. In each of these publications there are clear knowledge gaps identified citing the need of more research to better understand digital hoarding. [2] [11]
Sweeten et al. conducted one of the first research projects in 2018 that focused on digital hoarding, examining characteristics and potential problems associated with digital hoarding. [2] They identified five barriers to deleting digital data including: keeping data for the future/just in case, keeping data as evidence, lazy/time-consuming, emotional attachment to data, not my server-not my problem. They also identified four problems associated with accumulating excessive amounts of data including: effects on productivity, effects on psychological wellbeing, cybersecurity issues, links with physical hoarding. Participants in this study were frequently surprised by how much data they accumulated yet still experienced difficulties when discussing discarding that information. This study of digital hoarding was limited by a small sample of participants and the absence of an agreed upon standardized scale to measure digital hoarding behavior. [2]
Vitale et al. published another early research project in 2018 investigating digital data perceptions among a small sample of individuals with diverse backgrounds. This research focused on what digital items individuals held onto for multiple years and the criteria used to determine why and how those digital items were considered worth saving. The researchers used hoarding and minimalism as two extremes to discuss the spectrum of tendencies uncovered during interviews as they found these tendencies required context for understanding and not fitted for binary categorization. [11]
In addition to bringing attention to hoarding tendencies, Vitale et al.'s research compared and contrasted these tendencies as they relate to identity construction. [11] Dillon suggests within the spectrum Vitale et al. established with hoarding and minimalism as extremes at each end, most human engagement with digital and physical objects falls in between those two extremes. [6]
Published studies focused on digital hoarding include adult participants and no children. One researcher in search of ways to apply what is known about adult hoarding to identifying and treating hoarding behavior exhibited by children suggested further research into digital hoarding behavior among children. [13]
The focus of existing studies on digital hoarding are narrow in scope, typically focusing on determining what differences and similarities exist between people's reasons to accumulate digital material in a work setting vs private setting. This boundary between work vs personal information spaces is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain prompting some archivists to suggest work and personal information could merge into personal record keeping. Other limitations include small sample research groups and a lack of agreed upon metrics to fully measure the aspects of digital hoarding behavior. [14] [15]
Digital hoarding occurs in any electronic spaces where information is stored. These are common areas where digital clutter may exist:[ citation needed ]
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”, even reaching the maximum limit of 5000 for example, that may merely be acquaintances or lapsed contacts or even complete strangers. [16] 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. [16]
Digital hoarding stems from a variety of individual traits and habits, corporate conditions, and societal trends:
Digital hoarding can lead to potential issues:
From the few studies that have specifically examined digital hoarding, participants cite their reasoning for saving many digital files is due to the lack of physical space it takes up. [2] [5] Siddick et al. examined carbon and water footprints of data centers located in the United States noting a lack of transparency surrounding the role of data centers in handling data, obscuring the environmental implications of data centers from the public eye. [25]
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. [26] 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. [27]
Digital clutter is the term often used to describe the resulting (digital) artifacts of digital hoarding, but it should not be understood as exclusively the result of hoarding. Digital clutter can be created as a side-effect of high occurrences of another user activity, such as the computer desktop icons created through frequent installation of applications. In such a case the clutter does not reflect the user's intent to hoard.[ citation needed ]
Housekeeping is the term often used to refer to the activity by which digital clutter moves out of the 'clutter' designation, either by being thrown away, being organised, or by the recognition of its importance, thus no longer making it part of the 'clutter'.[ citation needed ]
Gadget hoarding is the excessive hoarding of electronic hardware including computers, cellphones, wires and cables, VCR and DVD players, audio equipment, routers, and tablets; it can occur in individuals alongside digital hoarding. [28] [29] [30] [31] [32] [33] [34] [35] [36]
The Internet is the global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a network of networks that consists of private, public, academic, business, and government networks of local to global scope, linked by a broad array of electronic, wireless, and optical networking technologies. The Internet carries a vast range of information resources and services, such as the interlinked hypertext documents and applications of the World Wide Web (WWW), electronic mail, telephony, and file sharing.
Privacy is the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves, and thereby express themselves selectively.
Personal information management (PIM) is the study and implementation of the activities that people perform in order to acquire or create, store, organize, maintain, retrieve, and use informational items such as documents, web pages, and email messages for everyday use to complete tasks and fulfill a person's various roles ; it is information management with intrapersonal scope. Personal knowledge management is by some definitions a subdomain.
Hoarding disorder (HD) or Plyushkin's disorder, is a mental disorder characterised by persistent difficulty in parting with possessions and engaging in excessive acquisition of items that are not needed or for which no space is available. This results in severely cluttered living spaces, distress, and impairment in personal, family, social, educational, occupational, or other important areas of functioning. Excessive acquisition is characterized by repetitive urges or behaviours related to amassing or buying property. Difficulty discarding possessions is characterized by a perceived need to save items and distress associated with discarding them. Accumulation of possessions results in living spaces becoming cluttered to the point that their use or safety is compromised. It is recognised by the eleventh revision of the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-11) and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th edition (DSM-5).
Hoarding is the act of engaging in excessive acquisition of items that are not needed or for which no space is available.
Information overload is the difficulty in understanding an issue and effectively making decisions when one has too much information (TMI) about that issue, and is generally associated with the excessive quantity of daily information. The term "information overload" was first used as early as 1962 by scholars in management and information studies, including in Bertram Gross' 1964 book, The Managing of Organizations, and was further popularized by Alvin Toffler in his bestselling 1970 book Future Shock. Speier et al. (1999) said that if input exceeds the processing capacity, information overload occurs, which is likely to reduce the quality of the decisions.
Animal hoarding, sometimes called Noah syndrome, is keeping a higher-than-usual number of animals as domestic pets without the ability to properly house or care for them, while at the same time denying this inability. Compulsive hoarding can be characterized as a symptom of a mental disorder rather than deliberate cruelty towards animals. Hoarders are deeply attached to their pets and find it extremely difficult to let the pets go. They typically cannot comprehend that they are harming their pets by failing to provide them with proper care. Hoarders tend to believe that they provide the right amount of care for them. The American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals provides a "Hoarding Prevention Team", which works with hoarders to help them attain a manageable and healthy number of pets.
In interface design, a tab is a graphical user interface object that allows multiple documents or panels to be contained within a single window, using tabs as a navigational widget for switching between sets of documents. It is an interface style most commonly associated with web browsers, web applications, text editors, and preference panels, with window managers and tiling window managers.
Google Desktop was a computer program with desktop search capabilities, created by Google for Linux, Apple Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows systems. It allowed text searches of a user's email messages, computer files, music, photos, chats, web pages viewed, and the ability to display "Google Gadgets" on the user's desktop in a sidebar.
Email marketing is the act of sending a commercial message, typically to a group of people, using email. In its broadest sense, every email sent to a potential or current customer could be considered email marketing. It involves using email to send advertisements, request business, or solicit sales or donations. Email marketing strategies commonly seek to achieve one or more of three primary objectives: build loyalty, trust, or brand awareness. The term usually refers to sending email messages with the purpose of enhancing a merchant's relationship with current or previous customers, encouraging customer loyalty and repeat business, acquiring new customers or convincing current customers to purchase something immediately, and sharing third-party ads.
Internet privacy involves the right or mandate of personal privacy concerning the storage, re-purposing, provision to third parties, and display of information pertaining to oneself via the Internet. Internet privacy is a subset of data privacy. Privacy concerns have been articulated from the beginnings of large-scale computer sharing and especially relate to mass surveillance.
Social computing is an area of computer science that is concerned with the intersection of social behavior and computational systems. It is based on creating or recreating social conventions and social contexts through the use of software and technology. Thus, blogs, email, instant messaging, social network services, wikis, social bookmarking and other instances of what is often called social software illustrate ideas from social computing.
Personal web pages are World Wide Web pages created by an individual to contain content of a personal nature rather than content pertaining to a company, organization or institution. Personal web pages are primarily used for informative or entertainment purposes but can also be used for personal career marketing, social networking with other people with shared interests, or as a space for personal expression.
In computing, a news aggregator, also termed a feed aggregator, content aggregator, feed reader, news reader, or simply an aggregator, is client software or a web application that aggregates digital content such as online newspapers, blogs, podcasts, and video blogs (vlogs) in one location for easy viewing. The updates distributed may include journal tables of contents, podcasts, videos, and news items.
Digital marketing is the component of marketing that uses the Internet and online-based digital technologies such as desktop computers, mobile phones, and other digital media and platforms to promote products and services. It has significantly transformed the way brands and businesses utilize technology for marketing since the 1990s and 2000s. As digital platforms became increasingly incorporated into marketing plans and everyday life, and as people increasingly used digital devices instead of visiting physical shops, digital marketing campaigns have become prevalent, employing combinations of search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), content marketing, influencer marketing, content automation, campaign marketing, data-driven marketing, e-commerce marketing, social media marketing, social media optimization, e-mail direct marketing, display advertising, e-books, and optical disks and games have become commonplace. Digital marketing extends to non-Internet channels that provide digital media, such as television, mobile phones, callbacks, and on-hold mobile ringtones. The extension to non-Internet channels differentiates digital marketing from online marketing.
Targeted advertising is a form of advertising, including online advertising, that is directed towards an audience with certain traits, based on the product or person the advertiser is promoting.
Netnography is a "form of qualitative research that seeks to understand the cultural experiences that encompass and are reflected within the traces, practices, networks and systems of social media". It is a specific set of research practices related to data collection, analysis, research ethics, and representation, rooted in participant observation that can be conceptualized into three key stages: investigation, interaction, and immersion. In netnography, a significant amount of the data originates in and manifests through the digital traces of naturally occurring public conversations recorded by contemporary communications networks. Netnography uses these conversations as data. It is an interpretive research method that adapts the traditional, in-person participant observation techniques of anthropology to the study of interactions and experiences manifesting through digital communications.
Money disorders refer to problematic financial beliefs and behaviors that can cause significant distress and hinder one's social or occupational well-being. These issues often stem from financial stress or an inability to effectively utilize one's financial resources, leading to clinically significant challenges. Money disorders refer to enduring and often unchanging patterns of self-destructive financial behaviors that lead to considerable stress, anxiety, emotional anguish, and significant disruptions in various areas of a person's life.
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A cold email is an unsolicited e-mail that is sent to a receiver without prior contact. It could also be defined as the email equivalent of cold calling. Cold emailing is a subset of email marketing and differs from transactional and warm emailing.