History and Context of Journalism (HCJ) Lecture 1 notes

Today was the first lecture in my Journalism course. It was largely an overview of what the course will be about. The following are notes from the lecture mixed with my personal thoughts about some of the topics.

Epistemology:

Epistemology, the study of knowledge, is something that I am interested in learning more about as it raises questions which are seemingly unanswerable, although almost everyone has an opinion about them. One of the biggest questions raised is where does our knowledge come from? 

 As children we are incredibly impressionable and until school begins it is typical that children will take whatever their parent tells them to be truth as they posess no outside knowledge that would conflict with or challenge what they are told. Then once at school children will largely continue to accept what they are told as fact without questioning anything. For example, when learning the alphabet it would be extremely unlikely that a child would question the teacher "how do you know that B comes after A?" instead they happily accept learning what they are told. It is however much more likely that children will question each other if they do not believe what they are being told. For example if one child tells another that Santa Claus does not exist, the other child would then question how they knew that, or who told them? This could be because children are far less likely to question an authority figure who surely must know what they are talking about. Where as another child on the playground, in theory, knows roughly the same amount.

So when do we grow out of this habit of believing authority figures over each other? Or do we subconsciously keep this habit our whole lives? Personally I would argue that we do keep this habit on various degrees, whether it be as extreme as believing everything you hear or the news or read in the paper, or whether it is of a lesser degree than this. I genuinely believe that the majority people will, somewhat mindlessly, believe the knowledge given to them by authority figures. For example, if someone was to come up to me in the street and tell me it was going to rain tomorrow I would question how they knew this. If they then replied saying that they simply just knew then it is very likely that I would disregard what they had said. However if I saw on BBC weather that it was going to rain tomorrow I would be much more inclined to believe it. This is because I have grown up in a society and culture where it is trusted that the knowledge about the weather has been well researched.
But is there really any difference between someone telling me tomorrow's weather on the street and the weather man on the television telling me tomorrow's weather? After all I would not have personally seen all the research that the weatherman used in order to predict the weather so what reason do I have to believe it other than because society trust the news and weather from the BBC, being an official establishment?
Jean Baudrillard expanded on this idea in his book 'The gulf war did not take place'. Baudrillard did not deny that the violent events of the war took place, he instead only raised the issue of interpretation. He claimed that there could be a considerable difference between events that took place to how those events were then portrayed, raising the point that huge numbers of people were learning about the events through the media and accepting them to be true without knowing first hand where the information had come from or how it could have been interpreted.

This, of course, is not a new idea. Propaganda for example has been occurring for hundreds of years, and has been occurring very successfully, proving that if knowledge and ideals are coming from any authority figure it is not that hard to persuade huge numbers of people that certain "facts" are true. No better example of this are events such as Hitler's propaganda about Jewish people (shown left), or more contraverisally, the questionable 1969 moon landings. Shown below is the footage of the moon landing which was broadcast to home all over the world, and that convinced millions people for decades that man landed on the moon. Below that video is footage from a series of Fox documentaries claiming that the moon landing was a hoax. Does the hoax evidence in the video suggest that people were naive to accept the knowledge they were given from NASA? Or would accepting the moon landing as a hoax be equally naive?

So should we be sourcing our information first hand before accepting anything we are told? Personally I believe that it would be illogical to suggest that every single person should, for example, look at satellite pictures themselves to see where the information about tomorrow's weather is coming from. I think it would be much more sensible for people to not blindly follow every single thing they are told and particularly that they should research thoroughly anything that they are going to tell as fact.

Studying epistemology is something that I am going to find very interesting because I would like to know what other people on my course think about what knowledge we should believe and where we get our knowledge from.

Plato:

Plato is a topic of the course that already have some knowledge on. In the lecture Mr Horrie mentioned Plato's cave analagy as well as his theory of Forms. These are both topics that I studied in considerable detail as part of my A level philosophy course.

The following is a very simplistic explaination of Plato's cave analagy:

• Imagine a group of prisoners who are chained up in a very dark cave and have never seen the world outside of the cave.
• They are chained in such a way that the only way they can look is directly ahead to the cave wall.
• Outside the cave is a fire.
• People in the outside world make puppets which they hold up to the fire. The shadows of these puppets are cast against the cave wall and the prisoners watch them and think that the shadows are real life objects and people as they have no experience of the outside world.
• One day one of the prisoners is unchained and pulled up out of the cave to the outside world.
• At first the prisoner is scared by the outside and is blinded by the bright sunlight and he wants to retreat back into the cave.
• After a while he starts regaining his sight, first by looking at reflections of the sun in water and eventually he is able to look at the sun.
• He realises that the sun is the most glorious thing he has ever seen and goes back to the cave to tell the other prisoners about the outside world.
• The other prisoners think that he is insane and don't believe anything that he said, ultimately thinking that his time out of the cave has made him mental so they stay where they are.

Plato used this analagy to try and explain his beliefs about the world around us, and about the world of the forms beyond what we understand as reality. In the analagy all the people and objects are representational of the following things:

• Prisoners - the prisoners represent us, people who are trapped in the world of appearances.
• The prisoner who went back - the prisoner who found the truth then tried to help the other represents a philosopher. This fits with Plato's belief that philosophers were the intelligent people and that it should be philosophers who are incharge of countries.
• Puppets - the puppets represent the things that people use to try and deceive us. When you translate this to modern society the puppets could represent things such as the media, television, reality shows, etc.
• Shadows - the shadows represent the things which we think to be real when infact they are only imitations of real things.
• Outside world - the outside world represents the world of the forms, where there are the original verisions of the imitations in the world of appearances.
• The sun - the sun represents the Form of the Good, which Plato believed to be the source of ultimate goodness.

Plato believed that what we deem to be reality, the world of appearances, is full of imitations of one original form. For example there are hundereds of different styles of chairs in this world, and they are all slightly flawed versions of the ultimate perfect form of a chair. Plato defined the forms as being completely immutable. He claimed that we all know the perfect version of every form because we learned them before we were born and we remember in this world through anamnesis.
For example, we are all able to recognise what a dog is. When asked to describe a dog, most people will answer with the traits such as a tail, four legs and fur. Both pictures below show an animal with four legs, fur and tail although we are able to recognise one as a dog and one as a cat. Similarly the third image shows a dog with three legs and we are still able to recognise it as being a dog. Plato would say that  is because we subconsiously remember the from of a dog.

There are however flaws with Plato's theory of forms. For example, if everything has a perfect form then surely there must need to be a perfect form of all the forms - meaning that the forms are not the ultimate perfect things. Also would there be a perfect form of man and woman or would there be only a perfect form of a human? The principle that everything has a perfect form also suggests that there must be a perfect from of things such as disease. These are just a few of the flaws and already it would be hard to sustain arguments for Plato's theory. However the fact that I am discussing the idea of a philosopher who was born approximately 427BC shows just how influential his thinking was, and although there are challenges to his theory, to this day noone has been able to completely discredit it. Plato's works and theories were incredibly innovative and have proven to be invaluable.

Aristotle:

Aristotle was a greek philosopher and student of Plato. His ideas were incredibly influential for thousands of years but were largely rejected during the Enlightenment (see further down the blog!) particualrly by Renee Descartes.

Aristotle had some rather extreme views which is a large reason as to why his work has been rejected. For example, he saw women as empty vessels who played no role in procreation other than carrying and giving birth to the child. He claimed that men were the ones who actually created children. This is also a reason why feminists rejected Aristotle's theories.

On the other hand Aristotle was incredibly influential in Christianity. His theology was later collaborated with Christiaity which left Christianty open for modern scientific dicoveries as Aristotle was a scientist as well as philosopher.

The Renaissance:

The Renaissance is another area of the course that we were told about in the lecture today. I do not know a great deal about the Renaissance as I have only studied it in regards to the impact it had on literature as part of the A2 English Literature course - Love through the ages. Therefore this is an area that I am interested in expanding my knowledge on.

I learned today that art played a huge part in the Renaissance with the development of realistic perspectives. I learnt that Giotto de Bondone was incredibly influential, and is credited with being one of the first artists to turn to more realistic paintings.

I am familiar with some Renaissance pieces of art, for example the Creation of Adam and David by Michelangelo, Lionada da Vinci's Monalisa, although this proabably comes as no surpirse as they are easily recognisable worldwide as being incredibly innovative for their time. The fact that these pieces are so famous even to this day reflects the huge lasting effect that the Rennaissance had on society.

The Enlightenment:

I learnt today that the key idea which moved society from the Rennaissance to the Enlightment was the idea that "we are not figures in the landscape, we are makers of the landscape"

The Enlightenment spanned over the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. The groundbreaking work of Isaac Newton dramatically influenced the Enlightenment. His finding about the scientific world showed people that there were other explainations available about the workings of the world outside of the predominantly Christian world view held by society. People saw that he had used reason and logical to reach conclusions about the world, encouraging people to look for answers outside of religion.

Freedom of speech was a prominant belief during the Enlightenment. Enlightenment philosopher and writer Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) hilghlighted this belief stating "I do not agree with anything that you say but I'll defend to the death your right to say it." This shows the conviction to which people believed that everyone should be free to say and belief whatever they wanted to. This was a dramatic change from a society in which people were discouraged to hold any beliefs which differed from those of the church and of the rest of society.

It was an incredibly important time of change in all areas of culture including art, literature, technology and religion to name just a few!

These are just a few of the ideas that were discussed in the lecture and I am looking forward to learning more about everything!