Reaction to "Media Ecology" by Lum

It's interesting the Lum continually uses 'intrinsic' when referring to the media throughout this article. The media is an 'intrinsic symbolic universe' that 'obliterate notion of time and space' because of it's 'intrinsic biases(Lum,29;38;33).' The meaning of intrinsic is inherently belonging to a thing. So in a sense, the media has created its own nature of things.

The very nature of the media is formed by human invention of the physical and symbolic forms that are used to transmit and decode information. Lum states that these 'physical and symbolic forms inherent in different communication media presuppose correspondingly different biases (Lum,33}.' Here again she reiterates the idea of the very nature belonging to these symbolic forms, as though these things in themselves have their own 'natural' course.

Lum does not give much insight into what this inherent nature of the media is but that it exists and we see its consequences in the world around us. This is well supported by the analysis of elderly significance in a digital age, especially in oral based cultures. The amount of information, wisdom, experience, etc that an elderly person had was valued and sought for from people. However, the access and amount of information that one receives from the internet by the age of 21, originally took a lifetime if not more to learn.

It's easy to document the intrinsic results that accompany the media processes, but the theory of understanding the intrinsic complexity of media interactions is a complex subject.