digital decay

English

Etymology

Compound of digital +‎ decay

Noun

digital decay (plural digital decays)

  1. (electronics, technology) The gradual process by which information online or in digital storage disappears or becomes inaccessible.
    • 1999 May, Jenny C. McCune, “Stored safely forever?”, in Management Review, volume 88, number 5, page 10:
      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.
    • 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:
      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.
    • 2024 July 25, “Digital Decay: The Fleeting Nature of Online Content”, in Impact Lab‎[1], archived from the original on 12 August 2024:
      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.
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