[randomdata]

You are right that people won't pay attention to anything that isn't already of interest to them, but the medium of exchange makes no difference there.

In fact, there was once advocacy towards a style of meeting (oft called a "standup") where you explicitly called upon participants to give their status update because it was recognized that they wouldn't be paying attention and needed prompting to snap them back, although this has largely fallen out of favour as we realized that only kept their attention for the length of their update and didn't achieve the desired effect.