Huh? People communicate about work all the time in my office and having the ability to initiate conversations fluidly means more efficient collaboration. Fewer meetings, and easier to keep all parties in the know.
There is such thing as too much communication. In my previous company the whole 10 person team sat together on the open space. The result was that my coworkers (sitting 30-40 ft from me) would shout a question to me, because they were too lazy to check project Wiki page to know which environment they should deploy to, for example. Or they would shout totaly useless notifications, like "I've just created pull request, can you review it?". Open plan offices encourage this type of pathological behaviour.
Having that ability is also disastrous to productivity. People realise this and resort to wearing headphones as deterrent to being interrupted. It means that certain people work in constant fear of being dragged out of their flow at any moment. This is why universities have strict office hours. There are types of work that just can't be done with random interruptions.