Exactly. His point is that whatever operations you perform from that point on is on the object and not the string that was used to represent the object as it was being communicated. The string is just an intermediate representation. It's the object that's relevant to your business logic.

Well the only point of serialising was communication, so I'd argue unwrapping a presentation layer format is included as part of communication.

Fair enough. I was coming at this from my current experience where a couple of different programs I have grab JSON from a server: the Python one puts it into an object, the bash script doesn't because I couldn't be bothered :)