The history and context of Journalism Introduction

Friday morning presented the first chance to view the history and context of Journalism and with it the theme of philosophy; questioning norms, right and wrongs, beliefs and the reasons for believeing. This is something I had never really questioned before and presented some suprisingly interesting ideas and theorys. However as a student studying Journalism, questioning beliefs and norms is essential to ensure that anything being investigated is fair to believe, avoiding the chance of becoming hoaxed or presented with false information.

This introduction, including an overview of the history of Journalism displayed a real sense of evolution of Journalism from the beginning of philosophy in the 14th century renaissance to the invention of the printing press and internet allowing history to be created, memories to be stored and knowledge to be shared easily and quickly. I was amazed by the thought of the role in which writing important events down by using a printing press could be so influential to remembering historical events and the impact they have had on the changing current world; history being a fasinating subject and an intrest of mine. Without such an invention any written texts would eventually be lost an result in a lack of progression  in society, an example being the loss of Roman and Greek abilities to build domes and create civilisation, which was lost in the dark ages. If this was to continue life, history and writing in general would all be very different and much less civilised. This shows the massive impact the invention had on all society.

The context of Journalism, also covered in this lecture was another suprising aspect for me as philosophy was shown to have a huge impact on the way Journalists find and record their information; knowledge being split into reason and evidence creating a need to see something before it can be accepted as fact or evidence. This is of great importance in Journalism as fact is essential to ensure that information is accurate, contrasting to ideas by well known figures of philosophy such as Rene Descartes who believed that nothing was known for fact.

This introcution to the history and context of Journalism presented me with a great incite to the reasons to why texts are written the way they are today; especially in Journalism with the use of facts and evidence and the importance of philosophy on history.