Years ago I started on creating a taxonomy of the various lifespans of digital information, before realizing the task was beyond my current means to complete. It's still an interesting topic however, and I've never seen any similar attempts to create such a thing.

Your picture highlights the ground between discarding from one's personal sphere vs. discarding from the public sphere. It certainly would be a different experience if people's discarded data could be carelessly thrown into the Internet to blow around--Bob's shopping list might show up in the corner of amazon.com until an admin cleaned up the page...Or more likely, other people's discarded popup ads would appear on your mobile.

the digital discard is 'delete'. colleciton of digital stuff will always outstrip our didital storage space, so 'delete' is already erasing our collections.

but, what abut the stuff online? will we ever delete all of that?

The online stuff will live on, only to be dredged up by someone with the skills and motivation to pull it out of whatever archive it is in.

People press 'delete' and assume the content is gone. Technically 'deleted' data is not necessarily erased. More interesting - people are not aware where back-ups exist e.g. cached, or even where data is stored in the first place. If you're phone dies do you know what is stored on the phone memory, on the SIM card and on the removable memory card?

In a recent study I was trying to understand what it would take for people to recycle digital content. In a world where cut and paste devalues individual bits, is there any room for recycling?

What do you mean by digital recycling? If, as you say, "cut and paste devalues individual bits", then it would seem that recycling is the only source of lasting value.

But we know intuitively that isn't completely true. A study for Vodafone showed a gap in mobile manufacturers' product offerings that, as far as I know, has yet to be capitalized upon: teenagers in particular wanted cheap, small memory cards on which they could archive SMS messages--one card for each important contact. Most mobile software treats SMS chronologically and makes no provision for filtering by contact...but I digress.

Some, probably most, people delete content or forget about it without deleting it. They have content without realizing it ("forsaken data"). I also know individuals who obsessively archive content of all sorts--but 99.99% of that data will never be accessed after archiving ("lonely data").

Privacy advocates will point out that it is actually quite difficult to truly eradicate data. Archival experts point out that it is actually quite difficult to keep data from degrading and becoming inaccessible (much like the magazine on the road--its content is discernable, but its condition is seriously degraded to where some data is irretrievably lost).

What I wonder: is archiving a (social, not technical) prerequisite for recycling in the digital world?

Encryption and redundancy algorithms offer us the ability to keep data secure and accessible, even without completely secure or accessible storage mediums. Recycling in the physical world is meant explicitly to reduce waste. Recycling in the digital realm almost always increases "resource" use. Digital recycling is the opposite of physical recycling in that you recycle desireable, rather than undesired material (maybe it needs a separate name, but please not "e-cycling"...).

Some magazines you throw away even though you wouldn't mind keeping it, because you don't have room to store it. Other magazines you throw away because you couldn't care less about the contents. Digitalization changes that equation--you can save it all, but it tends to become a homogenous heap at some point. It seems to me that most people don't want to throw away personal media, but organization and upkeep often make it too troublesome to maintain. Provide a good maintenance/usability mechanism, and recycling use will naturally follow?

For me recycling is spending the time to sort through something to prepare it to make it usable for other people. The motivation to recycle can be altruistic, or practical - the resources are put to good use by members of the person's peer group or community, or may be required by law. New York and Tokyo can both fine apartment blocks for not correctly sorting rubbish and these get passed onto the tennants.

A while back when I was living in North London - people used to leave old furniture on the street. Either it would be gone within a couple of days recycled by a more needy member of the community, or it would then be treated as rubbish typically after it had been rained on (this is London after all). A hybrid bersion of throwing away/recycling.

> Provide a good maintenance/usability mechanism, and recycling use will naturally follow?

My thoughts exactly.

I've been mulling this idea for a while: Lets say someone has purchaed DRMed content, and the DRM 'allows' the content to be played by other owners and/or on multiple devices. 'Fairplay' springs to mind. Once the content no longer has use to the owner it can be ignored, backed up, deleted or potentially recycled. There will be unexploited rights on that content.

I would like to see a true recycling bin on the desktop - it could be sponsored by a charitable organisation such as the Red Cross. The recycling bin wouldn't accept any old content - but would filter out content that still has (re-sale) value. The worthless stuff would be forwarded to the regular bin and deleted as per normal. If you chucked in a whole bunch of files it could sort through those which were DRMed, and work out which 'rights' had not yet been exploited by the owner. This content could be transferred to a broker and presented to the user for sale.

As with all recycling the sorting and preparing content is an important part of someone else being able to make use of it - so file naming (or perhaps auto renaming), having appropriate ID tags etc. The DRM might make it possible to auto-identify and tag up content if the previous owner has stripped it out.

> > Provide a good maintenance/usability mechanism, and recycling use will naturally follow?

Digital recycling wouldn't work for a lot of people quite simply because it will be cheaper to download content for free rather than buy recycled content. And where will the recycled content be sold? Amazon selling used digital songs, e-books? And how will the potential consumer know what they are buying?

Consumers have a choice where to download their content - copied free from peer to peer services and friends, or paid for from services like iTunes. The paid for option would look a little more desireable if you knew you could recycle when you're done.