Digital Hoarding
The Silent Threat
June 15, 2024 - Vol. 2 Issue 27
Welcome to Infophilia, a weekly letter about the human love of information and connections. This is one of the places where I’m developing the infophilia framework, an evolutionary, social, positive psychology of information, avant garde research. If this is your first time, I’m glad you’ve joined us. Open access Infophilia videos are here and here. As always, thanks for reading and sharing Infophilia!
Cite this article as: Coleman, A. S. (2024, June 15). Digital hoarding: the silent threat. Infophilia, a positive psychology of information, 2 (27). https://infophilia.substack.com/
Possessed: A Cultural History of Hoarding by Rebecca R. Falkoff explores how hoarding, once seen as a rational behavior, became defined as a mental illness. She examines the cultural significance of the hoard as an aesthetic object and the different perspectives on its value. Falkoff analyzes literary and visual texts to understand the themes and structures of contemporary hoarding, revealing how it reflects the economic, epistemological, and ecological conditions of modernity. There are some fascinating chapters on “hoardiculture,” “bibliomaniacs’ libraries,” and “digital archives.” The book’s title, Possessed is from a documentary about an Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) group in London. Provocatively, bibliomania is a precursor to hoarding!
Falkoff writes that in 19th century Europe, psychiatrists began to diagnose a condition called “monomania”, where individuals became obsessed with specific objects or activities, and their mental faculties remained intact except for this singular fixation. The term “monomania” was particularly appealing to writers, who used it to describe harmless yet intense passions, such as bibliomania, and distinguished it from more severe forms of mental illness.
The sense of being possessed by possessions …Those “possessed” by the material world appeared to early nineteenth-century psychiatrists to be suffering from some form of the ailment Jean-Étienne Dominique Esquirol named “monomania.” … relegation of madness to some small corner of the mind held great appeal for contemporary writers, as did the linguistic affinity between “monomania” and “bibliomania,” which had been in use for more than 150 years to describe the passionate, disordered extremes of book collecting. Monomania quickly swept through literary circles in France and beyond; writers began using the word to refer to a harmless quirk in the form of a fanatical enthusiasm for one subject. Falkoff, Possessed. p. 18-19.
Hoarding is a topic of great concern and impact in modern American society. The A&E reality TV show Hoarders gives insight into people “struggling with hoarding” working with “experts to reclaim their lives”. The show is now in it’s 15th season.
Today, I focus on digital hoarding, where people accumulate and fail to manage large amounts of digital data, leading to cluttered computers, overwhelmed inboxes, increased stress, poor relationships, and decreased productivity. Also, recognized more than a decade ago, digital hoarding was originally considered to be a form of obsessive control disorder. In 2013, when hoarding, was classified as a mental disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), digital hoarding became a sub-type. Digital hoarding has devastating impacts on human health individual and collective, our economy, and the environment.
To keep things simple, I’ll describe just three types of digital hoarders but people are complicated and so these are broad categories with fuzzy boundaries.