digital decay en · NOUN
Etymology
Compound of digital + decay
Meanings
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(uncountable) The gradual process by which information online or in digital storage disappears or becomes inaccessible.
Data stored on computers can decay because the storage medium is corrupted or becomes obsolete. […] Unfortunately, few companies are actively working on the digital decay issue.
1999 May, Jenny C. McCune, “Stored safely forever?”, in Management Review, volume 88, number 5, page 10:To understand how digital decay manifests on social media, Pew collected a real-time sample of tweets from the social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter) during spring 2023 and monitored them for three months. They discovered that: […] Nearly 20% of tweets are no longer publicly visible just months after being posted.
2024 July 25, “Digital Decay: The Fleeting Nature of Online Content”, in Impact Lab, archived from the original on 12 Aug 2024:We have no guarantee that anything made of ones and zeros will be usable, or even readable, in another 50 years. […] The world suffers a silent phenomenon of "digital decay". This quirky realm is mostly populated by librarians, archivists and museum curators, plus the occasional anxious scientist and panicky megacorporate record clerk.
2004 July 10, Bruce Sterling, “Delete our cultural heritage? The world is suffering from a dark and silent phenomenon known as 'digital decay'”, in The Daily Telegraph, page 4:
- (qualifier:aesthetic, uncountable) A visual style celebrating glitch art, data corruption, and pixelated breakdown.