Digital Hoarding & Information Anxiety

How digital hoarding leads to information anxiety and what does this mean culturally in the digital age?

Photo by Philip Strong on Unsplash

Davis had spent his Saturday morning reviewing his external hard drives with so much of his documents, photos and videos he had stored on them over the past decade. His goal, he’d told himself, was to clean out the digital dust and desiderata. Now he sat staring at his screen and the collection of external drives. In that moment, Davis realized he was a digital hoarder. He felt anxious. He’d never really get through it all he surmised.

Probably the biggest use of storage on our devices and hard drives or Cloud systems is photos and videos. Then there’s all those years of bookmarks, maybe a read-later app or two, toss in all those Pinterest saves and troves of saved stuff across other social media platforms and we’ve got more information for ourselves than we’ll ever get through.

We hear terms like information overload and digital detox a lot these days. Ironically, there are numerous apps to help us with a detox, or promises of better managing our information and dealing with the anxieties of our digital lives.

There’s a paradox too with digital hoarding and information anxiety. The more we collect and curate the more anxious we…