Technological Change and the Future of Work. Online "Water-cooler" Conversations? (PDF)

Seminar paper from the year 2020 in the subject Computer Science - Internet, New Technologies, grade: 1,3, University of Twente , language: English, abstract: The question, driving the following essay can be written down as follows? What makes IM (Instant Messaging) devices such as Slack different from earlier technologies such as e-mail and chat?

With increasing global connectivity, modern organizations face rapid organizational changes as for instance the increasing decentralized collaboration. IM is a communication technology that allows people to send and receive short text-based messages in real-time and to see who else is currently available. Many IM systems are available to be downloaded from the internet or come with other free software products. Commonly known examples are the ICQ Chat or the Facebook Messenger. Further, there are several IM systems that have been developed particularly for the professional use within organizations or other team-based work (Cameron & Webster, 2005). An exemplary IM device for the corporate use is ¿Slack.¿

Slack is a 'cloud-based digital workspace and information management system' (Johnson, 2018, p. 148) that was published in 2013 and originally developed to manage productivity and improve team efficiency (Slack Technologies, 2020). It is a collaborative tool that facilitates streamlined communication. One of the main features is the¿ broad accessibility¿ that Slack offers: Users can access the platform via the web, a desktop plugin or even on a mobile application. Thus, Slack allows team members from different organizations as well as from different locations to join the collaborations and therefore enables ¿real-time conversations.¿ Those conversations, which can be direct and private as well as within group chats, are combined into one central location (the 'workspace') that keeps all messages archived. Within this workspace, channels dedicated to a specific group, project or topic are compromised. Furthermore, Slack integrates several external applications such as Google Drive or Dropbox to enhance any project-related management (Johnson, 2018).