We can say that “digital hoarding”, a new term that the age of digitalization has added to our lives, is the digital environment of the discomfort of hoarding concrete materials. It’s like having houses full of junk that we watched on TLC on your digital devices.
If your phone, computer, hard drives, memory cards; If you are collecting necessary and unnecessary things for reasons such as “it will be needed one day” or “keep a memory”, you can be a digital hoarder too!
Stacking that falls under the category of “disorder”; It is a disease that seriously affects the quality of life as a result of accumulating emotional values to objects and collecting them by thinking about their future usefulness.
People with symptoms of hoarding disease; They tend to hoard anything that doesn’t actually have any value but seems valuable, which will probably never work. This is the same with digital media.
Photos, emails, messages, screenshots… Collecting and hoarding this type of digital data can show you’re a digital hoarder, but the level is crucial.
Accumulating is normal to some extent, but in some cases it can turn into a disease.
Almost all of us tend to accumulate and store objects that we value in our daily life. Because the emotional and functional dimension of that object is important to us. While this is normal to some extent, it can become abnormal in some people.
Some hoard items that will never actually work, and the thought of throwing it away or deleting it makes one uncomfortable. Commonly collected items include clothes, books/magazines/newspapers, bags or food.
Since digital assets are included in the objects we interact with and interact with today, the trend of hoarding has naturally shifted here as well.
Some people form an emotional attachment by overvaluing the items or digital materials they hoard. They hoard digital assets in all areas where they can accumulate.
We can say that this is the digital form of hoarding, one of the obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) types. The materials owned in the digital environment are as valuable as the items owned in daily life. For some, it’s like an “existence”.
Digital hoarders worry when they think the material they’ve been hoarding is gone.
People with digital hoarding disease; they can’t even remember what data they store on their hard drives, computers or mobile phones. He still thinks it’s valuable. Their reasons are thoughts such as “maybe I need it one day”, “a souvenir”, “I may need to use it as evidence one day”. The prospect of losing the data they are stacking causes anxiety for them.
Like hoarding disease in daily life, many psychological disorders occur in digital hoarding. The daily activities of the person with hoarding may be disrupted, resulting in cognitive and behavioral disturbances.
The first digital hoarder in literature, the patient became obsessed with backing up photos and his daily life was disrupted.
If we give an example of a digital hoarder; We can say that the man who took 1000 photos, including landscape photos, every day for 5 years, with the camera he bought. In fact, this man is the first “digital hoarder” in the literature. The patient has great difficulty deleting photos because he thinks they bring back memories and feels attached to them.
Moreover, it backed up these photos to four external hard drives and their backups to four other external drives. Constantly editing those photos caused time loss of about 5 hours a day and disrupted activities such as sleeplessness, disruption of daily work, socializing and resting.
Are you a digital hoarder too?
If the level of your digital data storage is not at the level of panic and it does not affect your daily life, you do not need to be afraid, but if you keep everything necessary and fear that they will be deleted, you can be a digital hoarder too.
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