ABSTRACT
Communication is the backbone of any social system. We can also say that communication is the basic, constitutive element in any social system, or in yet other words, that any social system is a form of communication system. One consequence of this conceptualisation, difficult to grasp at first sight, is that human beings are not part of the social system. In Chapter 1 we argued that the boundary between psychic and social systems is essential. The human being with body and consciousness (i.e. thought, perceptions, memories, feelings) belongs to the environment of social systems. In Chapter 4 we will demonstrate how human beings, as parts of the environment of social systems, can participate in society anyway. Now, in Chapter 2, we will take a closer look at the relation between communication systems and their environment, or to be more precise, their different environments, since every system has its own environment. System and environment are mutually exclusive; the environment is thus everything that a specific system is not (Luhmann, 1995). The environment of a specific system comprises anything from the eco-system to other social systems, human beings, animals, the material world, etc. Assuming that there is a large variety of systems in the world – a vast number of social, psychic, neuronal, organic, and other systems – this means that every system has a different environment that contains everything except the specific system itself. So the environment of a certain system is, so to speak, system-specific.
