[jakubp]

It's not just productivity. It can also damage quality of relationships and introduce unnecessary conflict - as any written communications tool does - because people also fall for using Slack to discuss tough issues. It doesn't replace actual in-person conversation, but especially younger workers and managers don't know that and suffer a lot due to lack of emotional fidelity of actually using their bodies to talk.

[gexla]

Communication tools don't create this issue, they only bring it closer to the surface. You have to learn to manage your emotions. If you don't then it's always going to something which holds you back. If it affects younger workers more than others, then that's because they haven't learned this skill yet. It's one of many things which people new to the workplace have to manage.

Some of the other more obvious emotional issues include procrastination and imposter syndrome. Everyone experiences these emotional swings. Experienced workers learn how to manage them. The earlier the better.

There are lots of things broken in the space of "work." Teaching younger workers how to deal with emotions is one of them.

[coldtea]

>Communication tools don't create this issue, they only bring it closer to the surface. You have to learn to manage your emotions. If you don't then it's always going to something which holds you back.

That's close to saying "bullets don't kill people, the hole in their vital organs does".

The thing is, text-based communication tools are problematic compared to face-to-face communication, even in people who know how to "manage their emotions", because they hide non-verbal clues and make statements easier to misconstrue.

[gexla]

In a professional setting, you can fall back on the rules of the workplace. My boss might be angry, but I don't need to read that he's angry. I just need to keep doing my job. Or I get fired. I'll survive either way (losing a job and finding a new one is part of the game.)

I don't need to care about the emotional states of the people I work with. There's base-lines of professional conduct and courtesy. If I reasonably follow those, then I'm good.

And what if your boss is just an asshole? What if the reading you take of the person on the other line isn't just a misunderstanding? This person really is being a jerk, then what? You be a professional. You don't have to take excessive abuse, you can quit. You can warn the customer that you will end the call (and you can carry through with the threat.) Being a jerk isn't necessarily abuse though.

Don't take things personally. Do your job. Work the process. Quit if things aren't working for you. This requires an orienting yourself to an environment which works differently from your home. It requires managing your emotions so that you aren't taking an existential threat level analysis with every non face to face conversation.

It's a different situation if I'm talking to my wife or children. Those are personal relationships.

[TeMPOraL]

Unlike being poked in a vital organ, communication is a repeatable exercise, so reasonable people can keep communicating over the lower-fidelity medium until problem is resolved.

Face-to-face communication may be ideal, but it has huge overhead and limits. Compared to the scale of communication text (especially one over the wire) enabled, I think the world is much better off with the tech than it would be without it.

Now Slack per se, that's another story...

[lostjohnny]

> reasonable people can keep communicating over the lower-fidelity medium until problem is resolved.

That's a very high expectation.

In reality the opposite is true, the less human interaction there is, the more people polarize around their ideas.

[coldtea]

>so reasonable people can keep communicating over the lower-fidelity medium until problem is resolved.

And has empirical evidence, of people communicating in text mediums, from USENET to modern social forums, proven the above?

[TeMPOraL]

Yes? I mean, I don't have issues communicating over text on HN, or the subreddits I frequent, or the Slacks, IRC channels and the mailing lists I'm on, ...

What the empirical evidence shows me is that there's a (possibly very large) chunk of population which I would call unreasonable on a good day, that I only get to observe on the Internet, but can't ever find in meatspace. I know what's going on over at YouTube comments, or /r/all, but such people are all mysteriously absent from my meatspace circles, with no effort on my end to specifically identify and avoid them. I sometimes see them speaking unreasonable things when I pass them by on the street, but that's the limit of my exposure [0].

It's kind of similar to what Scott identified[1] as "dark matter people", except they seem to be inhabiting all the non-niche Internet forums.

Point being, if you exclude unreasonable people, text-based communications are fine. If you include unreasonable people, I wouldn't trust face to face communications either; if someone wants to abuse you with words, they can do that just as well in physical proximity.

--

[0] - Actually, the closest I've ever been to talking with such people was the couple of times during my university years when I ended up on some completely random party with people I didn't know. This suggests to me that there's a strong but barely noticeable filtering/selection effect in meatspace social networks. School selection, or workplace selection, aren't random enough to break out from it.

[1] - https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anythin..., C-f "dark matter".

[coldtea]

>What the empirical evidence shows me is that there's a (possibly very large) chunk of population which I would call unreasonable on a good day, that I only get to observe on the Internet, but can't ever find in meatspace.

And it doesn't occur to you that it's the nature of the communication (online vs face to face) that might be a factor in this?

[thatfrenchguy]

Technically tools shape you and how you think, the same way the company culture shapes the actions you do.

If you see everyone answering slack messages at 10pm, you’re likely to do the same unless you’re strong-willed.