An Intermediary, in my vocabulary, is what transports meaning or force without transformation: defining its inputs is enough to define its outputs. For all practical purposes, an intermediary can be taken not only as a black box, but also as a black box counting for one, even if it is internally made of many parts.
An example of the black box is the computer. Latour gives this example saying:
A properly functioning computer could be taken as a good case of a complicated intermediary while a banal conversation may beome a terribly complex chain of mediators where passions, opinions, and attitudes bifurcate at every turn. But if it breaks down, a computer may turn into a horrendously complex mediator...
This leads into Latour's definition of a mediator:
Mediators, on the other hand, cannot be counted as just one; they might count for one, for nothing, for several, or for infinity. Their input is never a good predictor of their output; their specificity has to be taken into account every time.
Video games. I tend to think of the video gamer of today as....well, this. I guess you could call it the chaos and consequences of play without freedom. But anyway this is a few applications of the terms intermediary and mediator.
So, we have a short history that I am going to start with the use of the video game in the home. Pong was mostly inconsequential overall, but it was the first way in which video games made it into the house. It also created the idea that video games in the home on the tv were a good idea. In this way, Pong served as a mediator. After Pong, you have the Atari's the Intellevisions and the Colecovisions. These systems served as a further mediator and began to give the groups that loved to play these games a name. Once the name was solidified before the early 80s, those systems served as Intermediarys. They all served, however, as one. There was no differentiation between those that had an Intellevision and those that had the first Atari. The ground work was there, there were differences, but none that served as much of a mediating factor as what happened next.
The NES came around just before the previous gamer group had burnt itself out. With only so many colors, so many different ways to make the same blocks, gamers had grown bored and the game companies who were feeding off of the needs of those gamers had been too quick to produce. When the NES came out, the family began to play video games. The games were simple but looked infinitely better than those of the previous generation. Also, with the bundling of the Light Gun and the name Entertainment System in America, the burnout associated with the video game was thusly forgotten and assigned to the Atari's.
Now in comes the SNES and Genesis. This creates a rift, a controversy in the gaming world that inevitably creates the rift that partially removes gaming from all but those who could be called "gamers".
While this is a short history and I haven't explained a few leaps of logic, I am just trying to get most of these things together. The consoles seem to serve as a mediator when they are released. They create a new group from the groups that exist currently. Because of the varying nature of the generations or basic age in general, these groups may gain or lose; sometimes a new console will create a rift within a group and two seperate groups appear.
The seamless web is apparent in this circumstance again. The moves to these groups via the mediators as video game consoles, do have age markers given that the console has to be released at a given time to drum up media. However, within a year of the console's release, the group of people who identify as that console's gamer are very apparent. The rules and such are created by the now intermediary - the console of identification.
Now, things are far more complex than this and if I really wanted to be an ANT user then I need to acknowledge this. I'll save that for next time.
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