3.3 System Element

A system element, within cybernetic communication theory and systems thinking, is any distinct, identifiable unit that participates in a communication system by entering into relationships with other units and thereby contributing to the system's organized behavior. Elements are the components out of which systems are composed, but their significance is not in their individual properties in isolation—it is in their relationships to other elements and their position within the system's overall organization. Understanding system elements requires understanding not just what they are but how they function within the system's structure and dynamics.

What Counts as a System Element

In communication systems, elements can be of many kinds, depending on the level of analysis and the analytical purpose:

Persons as elements: In interpersonal and group communication, individual human beings are typically the primary elements. Each person brings to the system their individual capacities, histories, motivations, and interpretive frameworks, but their communicative behavior within the system is shaped by the system's structure—the roles, norms, and relational patterns that position them within the whole.

Roles as elements: An alternative to treating persons as elements is treating roles as the relevant system elements. Roles—mother, leader, scapegoat, mediator—are functional positions within the system's structure that may be occupied by different persons at different times. Analyzing roles as elements rather than persons highlights the system's structural properties rather than the individual characteristics of its members.

Messages as elements: In Niklas Luhmann's social systems theory, the fundamental elements of communication systems are communications themselves—not persons, but the communicative events that connect and respond to other communicative events. Each communication is an element that selects what to attend to from the environment, constructs an utterance, and generates a response from other communications. This treats the system as self-producing through its own elements.

Nodes in networks: In network analysis, elements are nodes—individuals, organizations, websites, or other units that are connected to each other through the network's links. The element's position in the network structure (centrality, clustering, bridging) determines its functional role regardless of its intrinsic properties.

Properties of Elements

System elements have properties that can be described both individually and relationally:

Intrinsic properties: Properties that belong to the element independently of its position in the system. A person's communication skills, background knowledge, emotional intelligence, and personality dispositions are intrinsic properties in this sense—they characterize the individual independent of the specific system being analyzed.

Relational properties: Properties that only exist in virtue of the element's relationships with other elements. Centrality in a network, authority in a hierarchy, solidarity in a coalition—these are relational properties that an element has by virtue of its connections to other elements, not by virtue of any intrinsic characteristic.

Emergent functional properties: Properties that the element acquires from its role within the system's functioning. A person who becomes the group's informal mediator acquires the functional properties of a mediator—approached first when conflicts arise, expected to manage tension, positioned at the center of information flow—through the dynamics of the group's interaction, not by virtue of any individually determined characteristic.

The key insight of systems thinking about elements is that relational and emergent functional properties often matter more for understanding system behavior than intrinsic properties. The same person can function very differently as a system element in different systemic contexts; the same role can be occupied by very different persons with similar systemic effects.

Types of System Elements in Communication

Different types of system elements appear across different communication contexts:

Communicative Agents

Communicative agents are elements that actively generate, receive, and respond to messages. They are characterized by:

• Communicative capacity: the ability to produce and interpret messages.
• Selective attention: the capacity to attend to some aspects of the environment while ignoring others.
• Interpretive framework: the conceptual and cultural resources through which incoming messages are decoded and given meaning.
• Memory: the capacity to retain information from past interactions that shapes present communication.
• Intentionality: the capacity to communicate toward goals, even if those goals are not always consciously formulated.

Human communicators are the paradigmatic communicative agents, but organizations, machines, and institutional entities can also function as communicative agents when they have the relevant capacities (or when their outputs are interpreted as if they do).

Channels and Media

In addition to communicative agents, communication systems contain channel elements—the media through which messages flow between agents. Channel elements have properties that shape the communication that flows through them:

• Capacity: the amount of information that can be transmitted per unit time.
• Fidelity: how accurately the channel preserves the original message.
• Reach: how far the channel can transmit a message.
• Selectivity: what kinds of information the channel can carry (face-to-face channels carry vocal, visual, and tactile information simultaneously; text channels carry only written language).
• Feedback richness: how well the channel supports bidirectional communication and immediate response.

Channel elements are sometimes treated as part of the system's infrastructure rather than as active elements, but their properties are constitutive of the system's communicative possibilities: a system with only synchronous face-to-face channels has different communicative capabilities and constraints than one with only asynchronous written channels.

Structural Elements

Beyond communicative agents and channels, communication systems contain structural elements—the roles, norms, rules, and relational patterns that organize the system's activity without being themselves communicative events:

• Roles: defined positions within the system with associated communicative rights and obligations (who speaks first, who decides, who mediates, who records).
• Norms: implicit or explicit standards that define appropriate communication within the system.
• Relational rules: the idiosyncratic patterns of interaction that characterize specific relationships within the system.
• Communication protocols: formalized procedures that govern specific communication activities (meeting agendas, report formats, complaint procedures).

These structural elements constrain and enable the communicative behavior of agents within the system, creating the regularities and patterns that make the system an organized whole rather than a random collection of interactions.

Elements and Relationships

The systems thinking principle that relationships between elements matter more than intrinsic properties of elements applies with particular force in communication systems. The same element behaves very differently in different relational contexts:

• A person who communicates dominantly in one group may communicate submissively in another, depending on the relational structure of each group.
• A message that is persuasive in one communicative context may be ignored or rejected in another, depending on the relational positioning of sender and receiver.
• A channel that facilitates rich communication in one organizational context may be underused or misused in another, depending on the norms and practices that have developed around it.

The relationship between elements in a communication system can be analyzed along several dimensions:

Direction: Is the relationship unidirectional (A influences B but B does not influence A) or bidirectional (A and B mutually influence each other)?

Strength: How frequently and intensively do the elements interact? Strong ties involve frequent, emotionally significant, multi-modal interaction; weak ties involve occasional, limited-content interaction.

Type: What kind of influence does one element have on another? Information transmission (A tells B), emotional support (A comforts B), authority (A directs B), coordination (A and B align their activities), or competition (A and B contest the same resource) are different types of relational connection.

Redundancy: Are the same elements connected by multiple independent paths, providing alternative routes for information flow and resilience against loss of single connections?

Element Functioning and System Stability

The functioning of elements within the system contributes to the system's overall stability or instability. When elements perform their expected functions—occupying their assigned roles, adhering to system norms, communicating in characteristic patterns—the system's equilibrium is maintained. When elements deviate—failing to perform expected functions, violating norms, introducing novel communication patterns—the system's regulatory mechanisms are activated to manage the deviation.

The concept of functional equivalence is important here: different elements may perform the same function for the system, making them substitutable without disrupting the system's overall behavior. Different persons may occupy the leader role; different channels may serve the coordination function. Where functional equivalence exists, the system is resilient to loss of specific elements—losing one element does not destroy the system's functioning because another element can substitute.

The concept of functional uniqueness describes the opposite: elements whose function is so distinctive and irreplaceable that their loss significantly disrupts the system. Key boundary spanners in organizational communication networks (individuals who bridge otherwise disconnected groups) may be functionally unique: their removal cuts off communication between subsystems and cannot be easily compensated by any other element.

Elements as Subsystems

An important complication in the analysis of system elements is that each element is itself a system with its own internal organization, dynamics, and properties. A person is not merely an element in a communication system; they are themselves a complex system of cognitive, emotional, physiological, and social processes. An organization is not merely an element in an inter-organizational communication network; it is itself a complex communication system with internal structure and dynamics.

This nested character of systems and elements means that analysis at one level is always a simplification that ignores the complexity at lower levels. When analyzing a group as a communication system, treating group members as unitary elements ignores the internal complexity of each person. When analyzing an organization as an element in an industry communication network, treating the organization as a unitary element ignores the organization's internal communication dynamics.

Systems analysis always involves choosing an appropriate level of abstraction—specifying which level of the system hierarchy to treat as the primary unit of analysis and treating lower-level complexity as background conditions rather than foreground phenomena. The choice of level determines what questions can be asked and what answers are accessible, making level-selection one of the most consequential methodological decisions in communication systems analysis.