Scholar Janet Sternberg has a different take on the metaphor- using her own metaphor to make sense of it all. Sternberg applies the Chinese "yin/ yang" metaphor to media ecology as a means of better understanding the divergence among scholars. She states that there are two basic intellectual traditions that can be distinguished in the field: the "yang" tradition of studying media as environments, focusing on mass communication and on intrapersonal communication and the "yin" tradition is studying environments as media, emphasizing interpersonal communication.