I recently stumbled upon the concept of stock and flow of information. In simple words flow is everything that is occurring within a time interval, and stock everything that can be observed statically. For example, RSS feeds and blog entries such as this one are flow, archived blog entries and structured content to be found later such as a Wiki entry are stock. In less prosaic style, flows are the rivers, stocks are the reservoirs.
The terms, which are widely used in economics, business and accounting, are distinguished by their relation to time. Stock variables are measured on a given time, whereas flow are measured within an time interval. The concept was originally devised by system dynamics scientist Jay Forrester, who originally referred to the terms as Level (stock) and Rate (flow). [Wikipedia]
I haven’t been able yet to find any academic studies of stock and flow related to online communication, they are mostly associated to stock markets and system dynamics. CommonCraft has 3-part easy introduction to the topic in relation to the circulation and archival of information on the internet. Although the concept here seems to have been borrowed from other disciplines, it’s relevance is not all too inappropriate.
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