The “flow or stock” argument False dichotomy.
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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.
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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.”
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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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