However, it can be a good tool for information dissemination. (There are better tools - I'd argue that sending information should be pull rather than push, but that's just my preference).
So yes, have a guy write something down for 30 minutes, get people to read it, and then have an actual conversation / chat about it.
The modern trend of people believing accusers is pushing against this wisdom, but it's still far better to not have evidence. That said, I'm sure Slack can be persuaded to destroy incriminating logs if the right pressure is applied. One of the benefits of people moving away from self-hosted solutions.
Have a face-to-face discussion and have a shared written document. If I have to chose between the two, the I would favor the written document though.
On the other hand, status updates or sharing of metrics/information can easily be done asynchronously, because the potential to be misunderstood is low. It's also a more scalable approach and persists over time.
I would dispute that body language and facial expression are somehow always correctly interpreted or unambiguous, like most forms of communication.
Written word, or a series of characters in a string, as I think we in a technical forum with many programmers in particular can appreciate, can in fact remove quite a bit of ambiguity if everyone is careful about what they type.
Github has many examples of this in-progress.