The communication environment.
A communication environment can be judged from many perspectives: according to its thematic specificity or semantic verticality, its subject variety or theme horizontality, according to the existent ties between the players of that environment -if these ties are weak, strong, if there are any hierarchy stablished between the players-, and a long etcetera.
But maybe the element that more drastically defines a communication environment, is the context that surrounds that environment.
And it is not just probably one of the most formant communication variables, but the most unperceived one, the most complex to define, less categorical and present, mainly when we are embedded in that context.
The message, the code, the channel, the sender and the receiver, are elements usually easy to identify in every communication case, but the context is nearly always doubtful.

Contextual density.
Basically exist two types of communication environments:

a. Low density context environments or light context environments
b. High density context environments or dense context environments.

Light context environments are characterized by logics prevalence, objectivity and individualism.
Are anaemic contexts, and for this reason they have to be completed “from outside”, that is to say, with notions contributed by each participant agent in the communication.
This is the cause this contexts are specially prone to communication mistakes or message misinterpretations: the receiver lacks a complete frame that gives unequivocal meaning to this messages.
Communication pieces that circulate in light contexts, do it generally through weak ties between people (remember that weak ties are those that are utilitarian, those that don’t deepen relationships between individuals).
Examples of this messages are those that take place in dominant social networks, or an email that we receive from someone that we barely know.
In both cases, if our tie with the sender is not sufficiently meaningful, we have to complete the context with our own experience to frame that message and make it significant enough. For this lack of context, the amount of misinterpretations in this kind of channels is so big.

High density or dense contexts, are those where the elliptical (in the sense that things that are understood, because the strength of the tie, can be omitted), the emotive, the full of nuances, the detailed, the highly codified, the multimodal prevail.
They are rich contexts, full of references that work as multiple and complementary elements that explain the meaning of the messages.
In dense contexts, communicational mistakes or misunderstandings are much more sporadic, because thanks to the well-stocked contribution of “semantic clues” they do, each message is included within a frame that completes it.
Ties present in this contexts are mainly strong ties; those where the intimacy development is very high.
Examples of messages that circulate in dense context, are those that do it in familiar environments o surrounded by non-circunstantial friends: this messages are not decoded just at a logical level (many times they even don’t pass through this filter), but in a multimodal way: who says something is as much relevant than what he is saying, when he is saying it, the reason why he is saying it, how he is saying it, where he is saying it, etc. All this instances (with a great amount of particular nuances for each one) are telling us something that completes the original message.