Commentary: How Can Technology Help Us Understand the Communication Process?

In this commentary, the author reflects on the articles chosen for the special section on communications analysis. These articles problematize communication and raise an interesting set of questions for both human factors and communication scholars to ponder. In the end, both sets of scholars seek the same goal: How do we better examine communication to improve it? Problematizing communication requires scholars to challenge their fundamental assumptions about the phenomenon as well as to tease out the distinctions of methodological approaches typically used by both human factors and communication scholars. Human factors scholars tend to favor forms of communication in which technology or task roles control who can communicate and how. Communication scholars tend to favor contexts in which information flows more freely with fewer explicit restrictions. Creating opportunities to collaborate in research on the communication process may create the best understanding of technology that can better serve our understanding of communication.