Slack lowers the friction involved in communicating. Depending on the kind of communication that it is, maybe that's bad or good.
In many corporate communications platforms, it is quite effortless to ask an idle question, use an emoticon, paste a giphy image, write a bot to push notifications into your team channel, express a witticism, or vent complaints. It was my experience that Slack made it easier to do all of these things more than any platform I'd previously used. I've been off of it for 3 months and hope I never have to return. The worst problem seemed to be the number of ad-hoc channels I could be automatically invited to, and it was not often clear whether the information exchanged there was something I needed to pay attention to (although in retrospect it is more so).
Different organizations will utilize it differently, and feature-wise Slack seems to have gotten pretty far ahead of the competition. But if there's any truth to the medium being the message, then I think that it can be inferred from much of what transpires on Slack is that as a platform it is a big time sink. There don't seem to be a lot of important degrees of urgency between an email, a phone call, or a drop-by. For me about 90% of the value in corporate messaging is pasting web links to resources, which doesn't require the other bells and whistles.
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Slack lowers the friction involved in communicating. Depending on the kind of communication that it is, maybe that's bad or good.
In many corporate communications platforms, it is quite effortless to ask an idle question, use an emoticon, paste a giphy image, write a bot to push notifications into your team channel, express a witticism, or vent complaints. It was my experience that Slack made it easier to do all of these things more than any platform I'd previously used. I've been off of it for 3 months and hope I never have to return. The worst problem seemed to be the number of ad-hoc channels I could be automatically invited to, and it was not often clear whether the information exchanged there was something I needed to pay attention to (although in retrospect it is more so).
Different organizations will utilize it differently, and feature-wise Slack seems to have gotten pretty far ahead of the competition. But if there's any truth to the medium being the message, then I think that it can be inferred from much of what transpires on Slack is that as a platform it is a big time sink. There don't seem to be a lot of important degrees of urgency between an email, a phone call, or a drop-by. For me about 90% of the value in corporate messaging is pasting web links to resources, which doesn't require the other bells and whistles.