Although I will attempt a more rigorous and historically situated understanding of the concept of "media" in a later section of this thesis, it bears mentioning that my use of the term media studies (following Horn) refers to something much more broad and amorphous than its common parlance as study of the "mass media." Drawing on and extending the work of media archeologist Friedrich Kittler, Horn contends that media studies entails not just the investigation of "flickering signifiers" on pages and screens, but also a specific attention to the materiality of "computers and gramophones, electricity and newspapers, television and telescopes, archives and automobiles, …information and noise," as well as the specific power relations and institutional structures which make the constitution of those objects possible. [13] Thus, to study media from the perspective of media studies is to see media as "not only the conditions of possibilities for events "be they the transfer of a message, the emergence of a visual object, or the re-presentation of things past" but also as "events themselves: assemblages or constellations of certain technologies, fields of knowledge, and social institutions."[13a] Put simply, media studies theorizes not just what objects mean and certainly not what they "are," but the slippery relationship between what they mean and how and why they became to be. 

This seemingly infinite extension of the concept of media to include any "epistemic thing" may seem to enact a broadening beyond usefulness (for, as Derrida might say, if everything is media, then nothing is),[14] but this widening also brings with it a number of key strengths which can help to supplement some of the deficiencies of more traditional, semiotically oriented approaches. For one, while many earlier studies of new media were limited by their sole adherence to post-structuralist, cultural studies, and formalist approaches (in other words, Michel Foucault's archeological account of "the seeable and the sayable"), media studies can begin to push past what Matthew Kirschenbaum has called "screen essentialism" by also taking into account scales and layers of communication inaccessible to human perception.[15] In addition, by decentering the anthropocentric notion that the realm of signification is the only arena within which agency and politics may be affected, media studies' hybrid materialist-cultural analysis enacts a kind of Latourian and Deleuzian inclusion by reassembling the social as a loose and dynamic network of human and non-human actors. Especially given that the computer virus is most often invisible to the user and acts as a semi-autonomous, mutating, and propagating agent once it has been released into "the wild," the media studies approach seems particularly apropos in describing the overlapping ontological and political techniques of the computer virus and its constitution in the network environment.
  

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