Digital contents are easy to hoard and with less management easy to forget. The books, apps, and games you buy on sale can stack up which you may never get around using them. Collecting things regularly that interests you can grow out of hand as you can run out of space. With digital contents, however, you can store it away and quickly search it back when you feel like checking it out. There are numerous items you can get off of internet like books, games, apps, and subscriptions on sale or even free. Most of this will be stored in the cloud and will be available with a quick search on the respective service, but if you avoid using any of them, you’re wasting time for no reason. Here’s why digital content hoarding is popular and some of it’s drawbacks.
Benefits
For future self
Mostly we hoard things because we consider it may be helpful in a situation in future. You may want to read the popular book everyone’s raving about, the game that all your friends are playing or apps on the most popular list. We assume it will come in handy someday or someone we know.
All we can say is to keep your emails to purchase safe, and one day if it comes back to you, you can search it up and turn the time machine on to what you had.
Easy to Store/Easy to search
With the technology leading towards remotely hosted servers (cloud) for storage, it isn’t hard to find services that offer a small storage space for free. If you couple them with multiple services and accounts you can have quite a bit of storage to store. Gone are the days when you had to store everything on your hard-disk. Unless they are super important to you and if you have good internet speeds, you can easily store your music and movies in the cloud without having to worry about running out of disk space.
Almost all services that allow you to store content on the cloud will also let you search the content you’ve stored. As long as they are named easily they can be easily found. Some premium services also offer to search inside files which can make remembering the things you need much easier.
We expect digital content to get better
The games we buy, the apps and software can get better over time. Even books on Kindle can get updates after purchase which isn’t really possible on the real hard cover books. So while they are new and promising, they will most likely have sales and promotions to increase their user base. If something like this excites you, you’ll just add them to your stack. This will often reward you for investing low and reaping rewards later.
This is why we often grab new apps with a good pitch or books with recipes, guidance and educational content. Because as most apps grow in version and not editions like books, they seem like a better investment.
The thing about digital hoarding is, it’s mostly free and will not waste a ton of your hard drive storage. Unless you are talking about 100’s of movies, numerous free services offer storage space to store your data. If you buy apps or say books from Apple store or Amazon, they are readily available in the cloud with a simple search. There is no specific limit as to how much books or apps you can buy. They may just be a record of your purchase which requires a minuscule amount of storage.
Drawbacks:
Out of sight and out of mind
While over hoarding can lead to issues with storage and costs to maintain them, digital hoarding has fewer problems. If you store your digital content in the cloud or buy it from a source, they may not reside on your own devices; you still can access them from anywhere. I’ve been collecting books, courses, and apps for a long time. While I might not use them all the time, they are recorded as purchases on their respective service, and I can quickly view those books or use those apps just by searching or looking through the list.
While digital hoarding isn’t as problematic or resource intensive like the real world hoarding, it may not be useful if you do not take advantage of what you hoard. That book you were going to read, the app you were going to try and the game you were going to play will just sit there without you taking any benefit. Using things you hoard are what makes it more acceptable.
You forget what you own
Considering things you hoard digitally are easy to overlook and ignore. You had to finish a course you got on a sale, but you never got around it. If you are determined to take advantage of something, make sure to make a to-do list that will remind you of the things you wanted to do. Even after making a to-do list and ignore it, then it’s probably not worth the time you put in hoarding.
They can vanish
As with the problems of digital world, if you do not store them locally they may one day disappear. The company may be bought out, the platform may be hacked or just stop working altogether. Once that happens you will have things that will just work work. Cloud services like Amazon, Google and Apple may have redundant storage servers but with lesser known content providers these are a real risk.
So consider having a multiple copies of your content in different services if it is too important for you. For example, apps can be backed up as files, kindle books can be downloaded to multiple devices. While it can be uncertain that they will still work, these are your best bets to save you collections.
