We explain what they are and what the elements of communication are. What are the signs, the sender, the message, the receiver, and more.
In all communication there is a sender and a receiver.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 persons, Come in institutions, or between diplomatic bodies representing different nations, to give examples.
For communication to take place 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, on information or the same message, which guarantees understanding.
Communication comprises various forms of communicative action; In other words, it can be through speech as support for sending information or it can also be through written messages or gestures. These diverse forms at the same time that they differ have traits in common, they all require that there be 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, they are the contextual ones, which condition all the elements equally and they 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.
What then are the elements of communication?
The receiver adjusts the information to his interpretation with the same linguistic signs.- Transmitter. Their role is the starting point of the communicative action, part of their own initiative the desire to communicate certain information. What to communicate and what is the best mode in a particular situation are questions that, except under certain compelling conditions, are generally decided by the issuer.
- Receiver. He is the one who receives the information and adjusts it to his interpretation with the same linguistic signs; His own interpretation of the received message follows from this. 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 a response to the previous one, successively restarting the communicative action.
- Code Y 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 signsThese 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, not everything can be arbitrary according to the wishes of the issuer, it must be stable at the same time; This is vital for the transition of content in the message. With respect to this, it is said that they must be participants in a broader linguistic system of codes that understands them, which is the linguistic consensual that prevails in a given society at a particular historical moment.
Communication factors
It is the famous linguist analyst Ferdinand de Saussure who, from his positivist point of view, performs this analysis on the different elements that make up communication. This author classifies the various factors into:
- External factors. Those exposed to physical and environmental factors, such as transmission of voice vibrations at the time the air.
- Internal factors. Which are internal mental and biological processes in which the material support 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 understand the historical context, on which discursive messages are influenced by the context of the time.