Something strange happened at work the other day: internecine warfare broke out over emoji use on Slack. The psycho-nerdism level was at 11, and it happened among a geeky staff that included someone who had recently merged a toy teddy bear with Amazon's Alexa Voice Service. The things you can do with that freaky device are probably illegal in several states. But I'm digressing.
Our civil war was straight out of HBO's Silicon Valley. It kinda rivaled the Tabs versus Spaces scene from Season 3, Episode 6. However, we weren't fighting about coding methods. What sparked our "first-world problems" brouhaha was Slack finally answering our staff's wishes.
This month's Slack update granted Slackers the ability to type a "status" message—or an emoji—next to their name and avatar. Presumably, this new feature would be used by staffers to display their availability—useful because our US staff of 26 doesn't see each other much. We all work remotely, and much of our real-time communications occur on Slack. We also use Slack to instantly communicate with our London-based Ars brethren and with freelancers across the globe.
As expected, the new "status" functionality was immediately put to use. Up popped a rugby ball emoji as one Chicago-based staffer's status message. A few other less-than-worthy emoji (Celtics!) emerged until the prized Golden State Warriors logo at last appeared. (That was mine.) In essence, we weren't using the new Slack feature to convey availability but to decorate the work spaces in our virtual cubicles.
And not everyone was thrilled.
Food fight!
The Ars Technica Civil War began with an e-mail thread suggesting that people not clutter up the work chatroom with frivolous emoji—and an online food fight about emoji etiquette began.
A Seattle staffer noted that Slack's new status functionality could be "super effective" if we (ahem) used it more wisely. The idea was met with a few boos. Our Denver staffer said she would use the new protocol just to display her work-related "status." But then our e-mail thread veered into a new debate: did Slack's new status features, even if used for their intended purpose, make chat logs harder to read?
I was not on the side of the haters. Initially, my reaction was, "WTF. Why are we discussing this? Get over it. The Golden State Warriors rock. Screw your workflow."
But the discussion reminded me of how much changes to our workflow, especially while working in a virtual office, matter. Workers today must manage a mountain of data on multiple platforms—far more than ever before—and some kind of personal process for dealing with it efficiently becomes a must. Disrupt a core piece of that process, such as reading Slack messages, even through a minor change, and you create friction. Some on staff really didn't like seeing emoji scattered throughout all the chat channels because they made skimming the content just that much more difficult and for no added benefit. So it's not surprising that the Ars staff went to war over a big change to its virtual workplace.
The emoji kerfuffle also reminded me of how much online interactions can differ from in-person ones. In reality, I hadn't even cared about this issue two weeks ago, and removing my beloved Warriors emoji was certainly no big deal. But I got sucked into this fight simply because it was online. Had this issue come up in a real-world office staff meeting, we probably would have talked for a bit and come to some resolution—or we might have moved on to something else and simply would have forgotten the issue altogether. I likely would have said nothing just in order to speed up the office meeting. But here, over e-mail, when you can respond at your leisure and those subject lines in my inbox kept tempting me on the topic, I continued to weigh in.
Pax Technica
In the end, I removed my Warriors emoji. Most Ars Slackers ditched theirs as well. The Celtics emoji continues to fly, however, but I suspect it will be removed soon once the Celtics are eliminated from the NBA playoffs. And one of our New York staffers continues to fly a pizza emoji that contains no status message. (Double foul.)
Slack's new update has given us five new emoji with real status messages already baked in, from a calendar emoji saying "in a meeting" to a house emoji proclaiming "working remotely." I don't think we at Ars clearly resolved whether it's a breach of protocol to use those emoji and their baked-in status messages—perhaps they also disrupt workflows. Binding arbitration, anyone?
Just kidding. The Great Emoji War of 2017 is over. There are no major injuries to report. The issue is played out—almost.
The pizza emoji appears headed to be a permanent fixture on the walls of our virtual meeting space. Maybe its owner should remove the pepperoni as a compromise?
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