David Warsh wants you to imagine an office worker hunched over his computer. “Then comes a little chuckle,” he wrote in the Washington Post. “A rapid-fire series of keystrokes. He hits the send button, and the scene is repeated by another manager across the room.” It sounds like a day in the life of the modern employee, one who spends hours on Slack, HipChat, or any number of work-sanctioned group chat platforms to procrastinate with office mates. But the article is from 1991, and those workers aren’t chatting; they’re e-mailing.
When e-mail first entered offices, people liked it for the same reason workers love office chat: It provided entertainment under the guise of productivity. “It’s fun to share secrets, tell jokes, flirt, complain about fellow workers’ peccadilloes,” wrote Warsh. As it did with e-mail, though, our love of group chat will eventually morph into loathing.