ABSTRACT
In a strict sense, all communication activities and their consequences occur in a process. It is only intuitive that it takes a process for a message to be conveyed from a sender to a recipient and for the message and its transmission (or mediation) to yield some sort of influence in the system. Whereas communication is inherently processual in nature and behavior, empirical research that uses process methods in the field of communication is still limited (Monge, Farace, Eisenberg, Miller, & White,1984; Poole, in this volume). The dearth of communication process research is attributable to a number of factors, not the least of which has been the familiar difficulty of collecting longitudinal data, as Scott Poole notes in his chapter. However, the situation is changing with the advent of online communication behaviors that are recorded automatically and traced comprehensively over time. Real-time, automated accounts of activities require little to become reliable and systematic sources of data about communication processes. It is believed that this abundance of Web data will increase interest in communication process studies in the future, as has been seen in the areas of business, marketing, economics, information science, and others.
