Flow/stock is a false dichotomy
There was a time when the boundary between flow and stock was clear. Image from the days when chat was IRC
Chat logs were not saved unless each person ran a program on their own to save the logs.
Those days are in the past.
Slack, a chat service, provides chat functionality free of charge
The free version only shows 10,000 logs.
The business model is that if you want to see everything, you have to pay for it.
That is, a model that charges for "access to a stock of chat logs."
In this day and age, most services have the following features
Stock information
Provide permalinks to stocked information so that it can be mentioned later
Provide a search function for stocked information
The converse is also true.
Many services have this kind of functionality:.
Allows others to respond to what you write
Notification of others' reactions
Some are slow, but gradually approaching real time
It will be characterized as a "tool for real-time communication.
Does the "flow/stock" dichotomy make sense in an era when many services have both flow and stock characteristics? → hybridization. In addition, there is the issue of people using the term "flow/stock" in different ways: Unclear dichotomy. I wrote this sentence with the idea that "information flowing through is flow, and information accumulated is stock.
And I thought, "You know, most of the services that store information nowadays."
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