2-2: intro, continued
Mitchell and Hansen more or less frame this history as a series of unbridgeable rifts between the term's more archaic and biological origins and its more familiar, contemporary definitions, but there is also a certain operative continuity between these definitions which begin to evoke long-standing, parallel themes within the fields of media studies and biology. For instance, in the definition regarding the vein in a fly's wing, we have media described as a channel for networked transport and communication: complex systems of tubes within which objects and information flow and disseminate to modular parts of the insect body. With regards to the last cited example in the OED, we can also see this definition re-mediated as a kind of vehicle: as any intervening material through which intentions, ideas, or simply forces can be expressed and carried. This idea of media as a mediator - as any epistemic thing that acts as a go-between or in-between - is clearly applicable to the notion of the "text" in media studies as the signifying, yet material intermediary between author(s) and viewer(s), but it also equally applies to the notion of the vector in epidemiology - the embodied carrier of a disease.
Clearly, although there is an entire philosophical tradition rooted in Aristotle's separation of life (bios) from technology (techne),[4] both of these conceptions of media (as channel for communication and as intermediary substance) represent the equally long-standing slippage between biological and media-technological themes. But while these etymological roots of the term will surely inform our investigation of the bio-technical assemblage that is the computer virus, we must first narrow our historical focus to the relationship between molecular biology and information technology since World War II. For it is in the hylomorphic separation of form from matter in both fields that we can best understand how the concepts of mobility and copying relate to the dynamic ontology of the virus as a vector in the network environment. Accordingly, it is also by tracking the interoperability of these terms across the seemingly unrelated fields of computer science, life science, and media studies, that we can garner a simultaneously more granular and more holistic understanding of the computer virus as a "media" object.
Clearly, although there is an entire philosophical tradition rooted in Aristotle's separation of life (bios) from technology (techne),[4] both of these conceptions of media (as channel for communication and as intermediary substance) represent the equally long-standing slippage between biological and media-technological themes. But while these etymological roots of the term will surely inform our investigation of the bio-technical assemblage that is the computer virus, we must first narrow our historical focus to the relationship between molecular biology and information technology since World War II. For it is in the hylomorphic separation of form from matter in both fields that we can best understand how the concepts of mobility and copying relate to the dynamic ontology of the virus as a vector in the network environment. Accordingly, it is also by tracking the interoperability of these terms across the seemingly unrelated fields of computer science, life science, and media studies, that we can garner a simultaneously more granular and more holistic understanding of the computer virus as a "media" object.
![[4]](http://scalar.usc.edu/nehvectors/lipshin/media/copy-footnote-4.jpg){kind=link}
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