Tickers and archives

2024-04-18

If you watch an old movie about the stock market, you’ll see ticker tape: a thin spool of paper that is continuously printed with real-time1 information about a stock price. This was revolutionary2 in history, and its form - constantly-arriving current information - is common in our world today. Construed as such, we consume a lot of things through ‘tickers’, including:

The opposite of a ticker is an archive: information that has been systematically arranged according to some scheme and optimised for later retrieval.

If a ticker contains heterogeneous information and it is updated often, it becomes overwhelming (Twitter). This is not true of archives.

It takes little to no work to use a ticker. An archive requires dedicated time and effort to maintain, or it degrades.

Most importantly, you cannot organise on the basis of information in a ticker, you can only react.

This is different to saying that you cannot organise around a ticker. For example, you can organise an engineering team to triage and respond to incidents on the basis of a Slack channel. On the other hand, you will struggle to pull complete information about past production incidents out of Slack so you can do continuous improvement. You need an archive for this.

  1. or near enough ↩

  2. so says Wikipedia’s article Ticker tape. The paper cited, HANDEL, J. (2022). The Material Politics of Finance: The Ticker Tape and the London Stock Exchange, 1860s–1890s. Enterprise & Society, 23(3), 857–887. doi:10.1017/eso.2021.3 is a little more circumspect calling it a ‘promised’ revolution ↩

  3. X, whatever ↩