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What is a possible modern equivalent, in our internet, and supposedly paperless age, of the expression not worth the paper it's written on.

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  • besides worthless? Commented Nov 18, 2014 at 18:53
  • A term applied to what? Perhaps you should include the whole sentence in which you want to use it. Commented Nov 18, 2014 at 18:53
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    Not worth the bandwidth? Not worth the disk space? Not worth the bits it takes up? Commented Nov 18, 2014 at 18:55
  • "Not worth the screen space on the monitor needed to display it" Commented Nov 18, 2014 at 18:57
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    @ChrisW: Noting OP's recent comment, I imagine we seek a term applied to inferences made using Google Books. Commented Nov 18, 2014 at 18:57

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The idiom is still valid and still in use.

I and many people I know will say an email is not worth the paper it is written on.
This the fact that there is no paper just emphasizes the worthlessness.

The obsolescence of the terms of an idiom don't render the idiom itself obsolete. For example, being hoist on your own petard doesn't happen literally often nowadays.

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  • I have read that in this age of electronic communication, the volume of printed documents has never been higher than it is today. It is due, among other things, to the very cheap printing facility which exists in almost every household. Commented Nov 19, 2014 at 15:22
  • @WS2 I can certainly testify to that. I work at a very small publishing house, and despite the fact that we are less than ten people working there in total, I would estimate our daily print volume at around 800–1,200 pages. Not including the actual books we publish, of course. Quite ludicrous, really. Commented Nov 19, 2014 at 15:39
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"Not worth the pixels it's painted with" could be a direct translation.

A "waste of pixels" is an entry in the Urban Dictionary.

Or "it's garbage" for people who use GIGO as jargon.

Or "that's pretty random" -- because "random" implies that the signal-to-noise ratio is low (however, the Urban Dictionary claims that in teen-speak, "random" is the new "funny").

Or bogus implies that it's bad data.

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ChrisW’s answer referring to pixels is quite good and frequently used (waste of pixels especially). If we compare them as directly as possible, though, the pixels are what is used to make the visual representation of the contents, which in a print analogy would really be closer to ink than paper. There is a related idiom, “mere ink on paper”, which luckily means almost the same thing as “not worth the paper it’s written on”, so the transfer works quite well still.

A stricter parallel might perhaps be not worth the screen space, but that doesn’t appear to be in actual use, so while it’s arguably a more accurate analogy, it’s inferior to ChrisW’s suggestion.

Going a bit further in the analogy, however, you could say that paper is the medium on which the worthless content is stored, and also the resource that enables you to access the content. A digital counterpart to that would be bandwidth (on networks) or disk space (on local machines—and of course implicitly also on servers).

I’m not aware of “waste of disk space/not worth the disk space” being in use, but it is common enough to call something a waste of bandwidth, defined by Urban Dictionary as:

  1. A page, picture, or document on the Internet that serves no purpose. = spam
  2. A person who consumes resources in an office but does no actual work. = waste of skin; waste of carbon; lazy; worthless

    Frank gets a lot of credit around here, but he’s a Waste of Bandwidth.

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  • Recently i asked a busy person if they would be interested in serving on a committee. The response I got was 'I would like to, but I'm sorry, I just don't have the bandwidth'. I had not come across the metaphor before, perhaps because I mostly associate with liberal arts people these days, who are not prone to electronic figures of speech. Commented Nov 19, 2014 at 16:16

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