We explain what they are and what are the elements of communication. What are the signs, the sender, the message, the receiver, and more.
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What is communication?
Communication consists of the transmission of information through the interaction of two entities , which can be of different types, such as communication between people , between institutions, or between diplomatic bodies representing different nations, to give examples.
For the communication to be carried out certain requirements must be met, such as the different participating agents must share the same repertoire of signs in order to give the same interpretation, or at least similar, about an information or the same message, which It guarantees understanding.
Communication includes various forms of communicative action; that is, that it can be through speech as sustenance for sending information or it can also be through written messages or gestures . These different forms, at the same time as they differ, have features in common, all of them require a sender, a message to be transmitted and a receiver.
On the other hand there are other elements that are also part of the communicative process , are the contextual ones, which condition all the elements equally and do so from the circumstantiality in which the communication is enhanced. These are physical elements that distort it, for example the distance between a receiver and a transmitter can make them choose to use gestural language to communicate, environmental noise can also lead to this. Or the sender of the message may not be present at the same time, and then receive the message, when a sender records a message through a video recording, or voice recording.
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What then are the elements of communication?
- Transmitter. Its role is the starting point of communicative action, part of its own initiative the desire to communicate certain information. What to communicate and what is the best way in a particular situation are issues that, except under certain pressing conditions, the issuer generally decides.
- R eceptor. It is he who receives the information and adjusts it to his interpretation with the samelinguistic signs; It follows from this his own interpretation of the message received. He understands it in such a way that he is then in a position to elaborate a response to the sender himself, for which he is going to position himself as the sender in this case of an original message and response from the previous one, restarting the communicative action successively.
- Code and channel They are also fundamental elements of communication. The code refers to the system that both agents must share which guarantees understanding, they are linguistic signs , these are arbitrarily combined by who is the sender of the message and according to the case of what you want to transmit.
Contrary to this, the code must also guarantee the stability of certain elements, it cannot all be arbitrary according to the wishes of the issuer, it must be both stable; This is vital for the transition of content in the message. Regarding this, it is said that they must be participants in a broader linguistic system of codes that understands that it is the linguistic consensual that prevails in a given society at a particular historical moment.
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Communication factors
It is the famous linguistic analyst Ferdinand de Saussure who, from his positivist point of view, performs this analysis on the different elements that make up the communication. This author classifies the various factors in:
- External factors. Those exposed to physical, environmental factors, such as transmission of voice vibrations at the time the air circulates.
- Internal factors. Which are internal mental and biological processes in which the material sustenance that is the person is involved as the vibration of the human voice and also include the mental understanding of the communicative code. However, his point of view does not include the historical context, on which the discursive messages are influenced by the period context.
