What The Heck Is A System?

This wiki uses the word system a lot. There's A Cultural System, and A Marketplace As A Cultural System. Distributed Systems As Artistic Media, and How Political Systems Align To The Means Of Production — In The Means of Production, and even more. Seems it'd be a decent idea to define what I mean by all these systems.

I think the best way of describing what a system is is to use a well-known and unrelated system to all the business here: and ecosystem. An ecosystem supports flora, fauna, fungi, protista, and monera within so geographical location. Generally life is pretty complex, and so most ecosystems are kind of a messy interleaving mish mash of interacting elements of varying characteristics derived from a common molecule.

So the system is the term given for whatever conceptually houses the messy mish mash. Or as Stafford Beer put it: The purpose of a system is what it does .