The Economist: The horrors of shared docs

Long long ago, colleagues would suggest changes to documents sequentially. They would make comments and add revisions to a file on their own computer, and then send it on to the next person. It was inefficient and opaque. The era of the shared doc has made this process much more user-friendly and transparent. But like all social activities, it has the great drawback of exposing you to other people.

Start with the fact that you can see who else is in the document. A succession of initials at the top of the screen confirms that your actions are now being observed by multiple people. At least one of them will be completely unknown to you.

Shared docs tend to get shared, and they frequently end up in the browsers of total strangers. You don’t know why they are in it, and they probably don’t either. Some people may not be identifiable at all: they have usernames like “anonymous tapir”. They might be the boss; they might be one of the interns. They are probably not a tapir.

One of these initials fades and brightens every few minutes, as the person in question repeatedly exits and re-enters the document. They either have nothing to do or are deeply anxious about what may be about to happen. If they are the owner of the document, they are absolutely right to worry.

For people will be busy rendering public judgement on their work in ways both overt and subtle. A cursor jumps rapidly from paragraph to paragraph, and then suddenly stops. It remains immobile, transfixed. Something must be very, very wrong with what they are reading.

It moves more slowly after that, its confidence in the author visibly shaken. Someone else selects all of the document and then abruptly disappears: they are off to conduct major reconstructive surgery in private.

Others are making changes publicly. Hierarchy and temperament determine how they do so. They might add polite comments, make gentle suggestions or just ruin things directly. If enough people are involved, chaos ensues. Someone adds a paragraph, causing someone else to make alterations in the wrong place.

Two people are engaged in a furious virtual battle over a single word, taking it in turns to overwrite each other. The anonymous user spends so long rewriting one sentence that people start to wonder whether it might actually be a tapir after all.

If you are the owner of the document, you do not have to watch this carnage unfold in real time. But the carnage will still seek you out. Countless emails arrive to tell you that there has been “activity” in the document. Activity undersells what has been happening, in the same way that activity in the ground does not quite capture a massive earthquake.

When you finally go back into the document, you survey the scene. All the initials have gone save one. This person is always there, day and night, but never does anything; it’s possible they had a cardiac arrest weeks ago.

Suggestions litter the text. A wall of comments runs down one side of the screen. So many of them have been left that some are impossible to see at first.

You click on one bit of text, and suddenly fly to a comment right at the very top of the document, in an area of the screen that changes your understanding of margins. People have left multiple opinions on the same bit of the document; you can no longer work out what they refer to.

It’s now time for you to start rendering some public judgements of your own. You may not be able to make decisions for yourself, in which case you will just add yet more comments. But if you have any agency, you will start accepting, replying, rejecting and resolving.

This bit of the process is the work equivalent of A Quiet Place. In the film, the slightest sound alerts monsters to the presence of their prey. In a shared doc, a tap on a keyboard awakens your tormentors. As you go through the doc, those damned emails are silently flying off to tell people you have been busy.

Initials start to reappear at the top of the screen. Silently, they cluster and wait. You know that they are gearing up to strike again. There will be more changes, more comments, more activity.

Provided there is a deadline and a decision-maker to adjudicate, this process is still better than what came before. A shared doc allows you to gather more opinions, and to bat things back and forth; ideas are less likely to be snuffed out for no good reason.

There is wisdom in the crowd. But there is an awful lot of noise, too.