Text boxes were not meant for collaboration.
How often do you find the majority of the coordination, collaboration, and team work you do happens by typing into (sometimes unsophisticated) text boxes and reading what other people typed into similar text boxes?
And now we’re increasingly typing in text boxes to interact with simulacra of human intelligence!
Emoji have helped — teamwork is easier if people opt into leaving hints about how they feel about something. Corollary: do not try to dead-pan in a text-only or high-latency video format. It will only end poorly.
I’m not entirely sure what to make of the humble text box’s crucial role in our society increasingly built on communication, knowledge, and using the two to generate more of the latter.
On one hand, before there were text boxes, writers have used various styli, pens, and typewriters to compose basically all of human culture and knowledge. So maybe the tool-in-hand (i.e., a text box) is not the crucial element.
On the other hand, given slightly more expressive tools, musicians have created the gamut of musical culture in only a few hundred years.