What the heck is Slack, and why is it taking over my office?

How a communication tool intended for the development of a now defunct online game has taken over offices and the social lives of people around the world

While social media has done a good job over the last decade of encompassing almost every aspect of communication in our personal life, it’s ( mostly) left our work lives alone.

Despite email having been standardized in 1982, it’s still the de- facto communication platform for the workplace. If you want to shoot your outside- of- work friend a message ( and you’re under 40), you’d likely send them a text, iMessage, WhatsApp, Facebook DM, BBM, Snap, Line, or Kik before you’d ever consider sending an email. But if you want to send a simple work request, you’re likely going to fire up those creaky old SMTP servers and send an email.

Or, at least, that was the case until 2014, when Slack thundered into workplaces and went from mystery application to ubiquitous necessity alarmingly quickly. Originally intended as an internal tool for a tech company trying to develop a now defunct online game, the easiest explanation of what Slack offers is a hybrid of chat rooms, email, and direct messages that can easily be scaled for users to switch between all three things.

The basic unit of Slack is the “team” which usually corresponds to the workplace you belong to. Within each team are “channels” which are big group chat rooms where people can talk in a public or semi public manner. Integrated within these chat rooms are many of the best pieces of social media networks. Much like Twitter, if you throw down an @ symbol in front of someone’s user name, they get an alert; drop a GIF into the chat and it pops up fully animated.

Channels can range from general ones open to the entire office, to much smaller ones for more specialized teams. Beyond the open chat channels, Slack also offers direct messaging between users, which allows workers to talk with each other in a space that floats somewhere between email and instant messaging.

Since Slack can be on your phone, computer or whatever, it’s much easier to send a message on Slack and know it isn’t going to get lost in the noise. The upshot of all this is a fundamental shift in the way office culture works in Slack workplaces.

Group chat channels aren’t just places for team members to exchange mission critical work info, but rather serve as the 21st century equivalent of the water cooler, with topics skittering from serious to silly within two messages.

What this means is that an important social aspect of the workplace is moved online — the basic camaraderie of working together on a project and talking and joking with colleagues no longer is limited to those who sit near your physical space, but can be accessed wherever you are. This, in turn, allows for a more collegial and team based atmosphere to pop up even when workmates live in different cities or even work on different floors.

Of course, these types of group chat rooms existed before Slack. In the 1990s, Internet Relay Chat (IRC) offered standing chat rooms on pretty much any topic under the sun. IRC was a cornerstone of Internet culture in the 90s, mainly because of the sense of community fostered by the combination of realtime communication and the self-selected social categorization people put themselves through by picking different channels based on their interests.

The key difference is that IRC isn’t easy to use, making it unsuitable for exporting to a modern business. The secret sauce for Slack, on the other hand, is that it’s very user friendly, making it very simple to perpetuate across a workplace. The fact that it can just boot out of any web browser means that it also offers a much lower overhead for IT than even email.

Slack replaces IRC so well that it’s started to spread beyond the office, with many professional or private groups running Slack teams based on shared interests. Since these channels are public within the Slack team itself, but private to the outside world, it exists like a version of Twitter where only the people close to you can see the stuff you post.

( This author runs a professional wrestling Slack so that the world is saved from seeing all the garbage he posts when watching WrestleMania, to give one example.)

Of course, by its very nature Slack is a closed system. That’s what makes it work. While it sucks up all sorts of information going in, unlike Facebook or Twitter, it doesn’t let very much out into the public eye. This isn’t a flaw, but rather the program’s key selling point. As Slack begins to move beyond the workplace, it increasingly represents an overall shift in our use of social media. As other inherently closed social applications such as Snapchat continue to rise, our love of online communities isn’t diminished, but the novelty of living our lives in public seems to finally be wearing off.

There’s no shortage of irony to the fact that through programs such as Slack, we can tighten control of our privacy while continuing to enjoy all the benefits of communication through social media.

APPLICATIONS LIKE SLACK SUGGEST THAT THE NOVELTY OF LIVING LIFE IN PUBLIC IS FINALLY WEARING OFF.