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Slack Wants to Replace Email. Is That What We Want? As the office chat start-up prepares to go public, some of us are still figuring out how available we want to be — and whether it’s O.K. to ping the C.E.O.
By John Herrman
Slack is coming for your job. The workplace chat company, valued at more than $7 billion at the time of its last funding round, is going public this week. It claims to already have more than 10 million daily users and, in its listing prospectus, bills itself as the answer to bloated inboxes everywhere...
Slack reduces email, and email is bad, and so therefore it must follow that Slack is good. Furnishing a considerable tailwind to this marketing pitch is that people really do resent their email. Don’t you?
Email, the paper suggested, had actually become an “interpretive scapegoat for the workers’ perceptions that they were expected to do more than they could reasonably accomplish in a day.” … Any suggestion that Slack is purely empowering must also take into account that it is, ultimately, a tool paid for by employers, and which grants them full power within it: to set rules; to observe or surveil their employees; to set norms anew, or to changenorms that have evolved in ways they don’t appreciate.
I've been using corporate chat tools since they were DOS TSR's. Every company eventually got rid of them for the same reason: they promote the idea that no one's time is too important to interrupt at any moment, unlike email, which can be managed as a task.
It took the TwitChatBook generation to find a continually-interrupting communication method acceptable.
I've been using corporate chat tools since they were DOS TSR's. Every company eventually got rid of them for the same reason: they promote the idea that no one's time is too important to interrupt at any moment, unlike email, which can be managed as a task.
It took the TwitChatBook generation to find a continually-interrupting communication method acceptable.
ok...that wasn't my question. have you ever used slack? Apparently not
ok...that wasn't my question. have you ever used slack? Apparently not
LOL yup
We use it at our workplace. It definitely has advantages.
I like the app better than the desktop version, and I like what it does with links, by automatically giving them a headline, description, etc so you don't have to. It does things more intuitively, which is less "work" for me.
I love slack and use it every day. However, contrary to what some are saying, I actually feel like it is less intrusive than email at times. While I have the app on my phone, if I'm not actually on my computer it shows me as away so people can message me, but they are aware that I may not see it for a while. It is also great for file sharing, especially with Keynote as it is often too big to send in an email and I don't always want to be a collab file.
I think there is more good than bad to Slack but I don't see it fully replacing email, yet. Not while some (often older) people are not willing to embrace it.
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