Microprocessing

Why You’re Constantly Misunderstood on Slack (and How to Fix It)

People weren’t made for the era of remote work

Photo: Austin Distel/Unsplash

In Microprocessing, columnist Angela Lashbrook aims to improve your relationship with technology every week. Microprocessing goes deep on the little things that define your online life today to give you a better tomorrow.

Efficiency is the trademark quality of online chat platforms. It’s so much quicker and simpler to shoot off a quick message to a friend or colleague than it is to schedule a phone call or an in-person meeting (remember those?). For many of us, though, efficiency has always been secondary to a different attraction: Sending someone a chat or a text feels like a semi-anonymous action, divorced from the identifiable, highly personal context of the sound of the voice and the expressions of the face. Typing out a message semi-dissociated from the self makes the delivery that much easier for those of us who are shy or socially anxious.

But this separation of message from context makes misunderstandings much more likely. Body language is a silent but critical feature of talking face-to-face, but it’s missing from most online discussions, resulting in a lot of guesswork the listener has to perform to read between the lines of a statement. Add a…