Digital Hoarding

History of the term “hoarding”

Hoarding certainly isn't a new concept. The word hoard goes all the way back to Old English, where it meant something closer to a treasure or stockpile kept for future use. Somewhere along the way that perfectly reasonable idea of saving something for later took on a much less flattering meaning.

For a lot of us, though, “hoarding” really entered the everyday vocabulary around 2009. That was when Hoarders showed up on A&E and suddenly we all became experts. A stack of newspapers was no longer just a stack of newspapers. That spare bedroom nobody could walk through? We had concerns.

Then came the heightened awareness of the “signs.” Calling out family members... being called out ourselves... identifying which house in the neighborhood should probably be expecting a camera crew next.

Funny thing is, while we were looking at everybody else's garages, basements and spare bedrooms, some of us eventually noticed another form of collecting happening much closer to home.

It was just hiding on a hard drive.

History of digital hoarding

Starting out as a graphic designer in the early 90s, I quickly became aware of the value of clip art. Not that we relied on it as a staple of our design, but it was a way to expedite some of the creative workflow. Add to that the fact that I was working in a more production-driven art department, and having existing assets on hand helped with turnaround.

Whether it was dragging out the “Art Explosion 600,000+” clip art book paired with its folio of CDs, or swapping Zip drives full of company and client assets, there was real value in having a library of material ready to go.

Then came the internet. Those types of assets became more readily available, stock photography exploded, and suddenly there was always something else worth downloading.

Technically, as a designer, you didn't need all of those assets sitting on your own machine. But the “what if I need this later?” mentality started to creep in. So did the feeling that if you had access to a giant library, like iStockphoto or Shutterstock, you might as well get what you were paying for.

Soon enough, you had your own version of Art Explosion... only now it lived across hard drives and a catalog of writable DVDs.

Then hard drives got bigger, storage got cheaper, and the available headroom started to feel limitless. So, much like the house stacked with old newspapers and issues of National Geographic, we found ourselves digitally hoarding.

Only now we weren't just filling our own “houses” with clutter.

We had servers.

For me, the shift into web development added another category entirely. I started collecting bookmarked websites for inspiration, coding tips, tutorials and references. Thanks to services like Delicious for bookmarks and Evernote for web clipping, my digital garage was now overflowing too.

And the thing is... a lot of it really did have value.

That's what makes it difficult.

The problem is that keeping everything isn't free just because storage is cheap. Someone still has to organize it, remember where it is and, eventually, find it again.

Sometimes the time spent curating all of these “assets” starts to rival the amount of time they actually give back.

Am I cured?

Short answer is maybe... or maybe the habit has just shifted again.

The means of collecting these assets and resources has changed over time, but I still find myself filing away one digital thing or another for if and when I need it.

Web bookmarks. New apps to try. Screenshots. Code snippets. Articles. AI-generated images where somehow iteration number 14 still feels different enough from iteration number 13 that I can't quite bring myself to delete it.

The funny part is that we're also living with the opposite behavior at the same time.

We have developed a kind of disposable mentality toward a lot of digital information. With text messaging, the only relevant statement often feels like the latest one. Everything before that gets buried somewhere in the infinite scroll.

The same is increasingly true with AI chats. A conversation can contain something genuinely useful, but a week later you may only vaguely remember that you had the conversation at all. Even the AI can eventually lose track of where the original context began.

So we simultaneously keep everything... and lose everything.

Storage isn't really the scarce resource anymore. Attention is.

The hard drive may have another terabyte available, the cloud account may happily accept another ten thousand files and the bookmark service may never complain about one more saved link.

But my memory and my time don't scale quite as easily.

So I probably still have some house cleaning to do...