layers - [addition to previous post]

(this is also posted as a comment to my blog post from yesterday, in which I promised more on layers....)

In the Langlois, I was interested in her insistence that software's "role as yet another mediator needs to be taken into account" (49) in contrast to its reduction to electrical voltages. I thought through this quite a bit then, writing "as long as it functions then it is, but I just today mentally coined it to myself a bit clearer: software cannot merely be reduced to voltage differences, because historically it is based on and in the moment it embodies particular (human) decisions, by developers, based on user-friendliness, &c.

Where this is intriguing me in regard to Terranova's book is that she too focuses on layers-- which I think are important not just because they "build" on each other (59) but because of this same kind of mediation.

"Mediation" for Terranova is in some sense an inadequate process-at-work (the social decomposition into "closed enclaves coexisting but not interacting with each other outside the mediation of symbols" (61); mediation, that is, prohibits more direct contact. But elsewhere, it is attributed different characteristics. Mediation is (trivially) implicated in the social (87); and I think the mediation-not-reduction process at work in code functions in the same way that labour does vis-a-vis human work (waged labour vs human labour (88).

Where I'd like to go with this is a comparison of these underlying processes compared with those that underlie the image-as-not-representation (141). But as a result of classes, locked doors, and faulty Internet, it's later than I wanted it to be and our last class is starting!!