[birdalbrocum]

> Asynchronous communication

> Rather than having flow and concentration interrupted by incoming message notifications, with email I can easily decide when to fetch and process messages.

Asynchronous communication describes the client-server-client model, and both chat and email fall into this category, especially since there are peer-to-peer chat programs. What the author states sounds to me like a problem with the notification model and fetching beyond the user's control. Chat is not inherently in "flow."

[layer8]

Chat is inherently in flow because you can’t manage the read/unread status per message, and you can’t move messages to different folders. When I check for email, I might have a dozen new messages, clearly listed one per line, and I can pick which to read now and which to read later. I have a clean overview with the mailbox listing and the read/unread status. I can easily overview 50 or so messages without having to to scroll. I can archive the messages I’m done with, while keeping those around I still want to handle.

In a chat, the read/unread status is not per-message. It’s much harder to discern separate exchanges within the same channel, and to handle them out-of-order when some are more urgent or relevant than others. They also take up substantially more visual space than a mailbox listing, so you have a much smaller “peephole”, making it more difficult to get an overview of what is going on in a channel. All this has the effect that people treat chat channels as a single continuous flow of messages that you catch up with in the order they come in; and the messages that scroll out of view, which happens fast, tend to go out of mind as well.

[birdalbrocum]

Ok, good points and I agree with messages as atomic unit of communication in mail vs message history per contact as atomic unit of communication in mail. This creates a mental state of communication flow (like a conversation) and inherently a different form than mail (more like receiving a mail in your postbox and can able to stack them singular).