After more than 20 years as a communication teacher and researcher, I find it troubling that I do not have
deeper answers to these questions, especially the first. Having just sampled four dozen published communication
articles for this essay, as well as in my more general in-field reading, I have the impression that
communication research is highly fragmented and fails to yield much insight into core communication
processes. In fact, I find it scandalous that no one is actually communicating in the data that is used in
much communication research and that most data is static rather than process oriented. I worry that our
theory and methods are ill suited to the task of achieving a deep understanding of communication.