From the paper linked by Jack Campin. When I've got a year or two to spare I'll have a look through this. :) In the meantime, a definition from that paper. I see what Jack means about Harker being more straightforward!


"We take the concept of mediation to refer to the bidirectional transmission, translation and/or transformation of one relatum (eg musical sound) by another relatum (eg technologies, discourses, social relations, sites and spaces). Musical sound is both constituted by and enmeshed in specific constellations of mediations (Born 2019). The concept may initially be clarified by Latour’s distinction between intermediaries, ‘what transports meaning or force without transformation’, and mediators, which ‘transform, translate, distort, and modify the meaning or the elements they are supposed to carry’ (Latour 2005, 39). Citing Hennion (Hennion 1991), Latour suggests that ‘a mediator?…??creates what it translates as well as the entities between which it plays the mediating role?…??The layering of intermediaries is replaced by chains of mediators’ (Latour 1993, 78)."