Stock and flow

How do individuals classify and organize digital cultural goods? Where physical goods are concerned, classifying DVDs, video games or CDs by size, format, genre, author, or order of consumption corresponds to forms of engagement that support the consumption of cultural goods and give them meaning. When it comes to digital goods and there is no longer any classification to be established by oneself, in what ways are the different levels of engagement manifested in practice?We draw on more than 60 semi-structured interviews and on data from a questionnaire administered to over 2,000 respondents using the quota method. The article shows how individuals set up attentional architectures to arrange cultural goods in stocks and flows. These practices are changing and are increasingly moving towards idiosyncratic forms of classification where the individual is the main criterion of classification practices. This is more a question of arranging digital goods according to the personal management of one’s consumption than according to institutional criteria (genre, date, alphabetical order).