BCSSS

International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

2nd Edition, as published by Charles François 2004 Presented by the Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science Vienna for public access.

About

The International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics was first edited and published by the system scientist Charles François in 1997. The online version that is provided here was based on the 2nd edition in 2004. It was uploaded and gifted to the center by ASC president Michael Lissack in 2019; the BCSSS purchased the rights for the re-publication of this volume in 200?. In 2018, the original editor expressed his wish to pass on the stewardship over the maintenance and further development of the encyclopedia to the Bertalanffy Center. In the future, the BCSSS seeks to further develop the encyclopedia by open collaboration within the systems sciences. Until the center has found and been able to implement an adequate technical solution for this, the static website is made accessible for the benefit of public scholarship and education.

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z

COMMUNICATION 1)2)

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The task of producing at one point of space, a message that was created at another point.

"The interaction between systems or parts of a system using a pre-arranged code" (J.Z. YOUNG 1978, p.290).

This definition emphasizes the preliminary necessity of a shared code, which seems obvious.

Which is however not always so obvious is that this code is generally quite complex, offering physical, perceptive, semantic and cultural aspects, in accordance, moreover with the characteristics of the environment shared by the communicating systems.

J.van GIGCH makes the point: "When Communications Sciences were dominated by SHANNON's work in Communication Theory,… the human communication channel provided this scientific discipline with its metaphor: a system grounded in telephone and electronic technologies. However, this school of thought has been superseeded and displaced by a more comprehensive view which embraces not only the syntactic, but also the semantic and pragmatic views of communication. Therefore, this field can be associated with the metaphor of a relational exchange system designed to influence" (1993, p.50).

As observed by K. KRIPPENDORFF, the former view of communication as merely the transmission of information from a sender to a receiver (SHANNON) has now been extended to interactions within complex networks with numerous feedbacks among elements or participants.

Indeed, some kind of communication is the unavoidable condition for any interactions, starting at the very physical level, and for sociality in ecosystems and in living systems.

→ SHANNON limit

Categories

  • 1) General information
  • 2) Methodology or model
  • 3) Epistemology, ontology and semantics
  • 4) Human sciences
  • 5) Discipline oriented

Publisher

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science(2020).

To cite this page, please use the following information:

Bertalanffy Center for the Study of Systems Science (2020). Title of the entry. In Charles François (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics (2). Retrieved from www.systemspedia.org/[full/url]

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