According to a recent Business Insider report, the laptop of scam suspect former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) was filled with so much old and redundant data that FBI officials had to work overtime to analyze the content. But Fried is not alone in his reluctance to part ways with outdated and useless data.
There is a hoarding disorder that involves collecting excessive amounts of digital material and a reluctance to delete it, and it’s called digital hoarding. And digital hoarding is being proposed as a growing problem in many countries.
What is stacking and digital stacking?
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder (DSM) recognizes hoarding disorder as a mental illness. Now, some scholars are questioning whether it’s time to add digital hoarding to the foundational book of psychiatry.
According to research led by Maitrik Kataria, a technology researcher at digital product engineering firm Simform, and colleagues, the average American has at least 40 apps installed on their phone, but they use less than 50 percent of them. Millions of Americans have inboxes with over 1,000 unread emails. And nearly 60% of Americans never delete any image or video from their digital devices.
D., vice dean and director of the Digital Enterprise Lab at Southern Cross University in Australia. Darshana Sedera warns that digital hoarding is on the rise and the consequences could be serious. She says her research shows that the collection and storage of digital content tends to increase as our “number of technological steps” increases.
Number of social media and surprising relationship of stored data
Publishing numerous articles about this disorder, Dr. Sedera said there is a positive correlation between the number of social media platforms a user uses and the amount of content they store.
His team also observed a strong correlation between the number of storage platforms used (such as Google Drive, iCloud) and the increase in digital storage. However, not all generations are equally affected by this fairly new phenomenon.
Dr. In a study published by Sedera and colleagues, the digital hoarding behaviors of Generation X, which they defined as those born between 1965 and 1980, and Generation Y, which they defined as those born between 1965 and 1980, were compared.
“We found that both groups showed signs of digital accumulation,” the team said. However, he noted that millennials exhibit much stronger tendencies towards digital hoarding.
It’s reasonable to expect higher levels of hoarding behavior, especially in younger generations who are “natives” of digital technology, Sedera said.
Consequences of digital hoarding on mental health
“When a person suffers from the symptoms of digital hoarding [constant acquisition, difficulty throwing, tendency to clutter], they are likely to experience adverse mental or psychological conditions,” says Sedera.
Studying the dangers of the disorder, Brazilian psychiatrist Dr. Bárbara Perdigão Stumpf said in an interview with The New York Post that “comorbidity is common,” particularly major depressive disorder, anxiety disorder, and even attention-deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
However, psychologist Dr. Nick Neave claims that not all digital hoarders are the same. In an interview with the British academic The New York Post, “Dr. “In research led by Kerry McKellar and published in the journal Interacting with Computers in 2020, we found that digital hoarding is relatively common, but it turns out that there are different ‘types’ of digital hoarders hoarding for different reasons.”
These groups are named as anxiety-based, compatibility-based, relationship-breaking-related, and collection-based. The anxiety-driven group does not want to delete any data out of concern that they may need it for reasons such as evidence or reminders in the future. The compliance-driven group retains digital data for an extended period of time for compliance with business or government policies or procedures, but deletes it without reservations when they are no longer needed. The disengagement group describes the group that can’t handle the enormous amount of emails or files they’ve collected, but chooses not to delete them for fear they’ll accidentally delete something important. The collection-based group, on the other hand, regularly stores its data, usually using external devices, but rarely deletes data other than the obvious spam or junk e-mail.
