Amendment I
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
I didn’t know that by transferring to University of Toledo to finish my bachelor’s degree that this would be the semester I would become a journalist. Some days, I feel more like a journalism major rather than a business major. I wanted to get my communication minor over and done with this semester, as a result 9 out of my 15 credits are communication related. Furthermore, they are all related to journalism and media. My previous transfer credits in communication were more related to public speaking, acting and the hands on aspects of video production. None of these courses focused on media and journalism so this is all new to me. On top of this, in April 2019 I developed a fascination with smartphone addiction and an ironic twist, I became addicted to making my smartphone less addicting and the negative effects of technology. Additionally, April I have read six different non-fiction books on the topic of technology addiction to supplement this desire for knowledge on the subject.
As one can imagine, going to journalism courses with a mindset of how harmful and addicting technology is not always lend its way to good grades on being able to do the assignments properly for courses where the work requires you to involve with smartphones and social media. However, just a few weeks into the school year when I broke my phone and had to survive ten days without a smartphone this changed everything. From there I was able to see how much technology both hurts and harms our lives and just how complicated our relationship with our smartphones and social media is. Further complicating things is our right to free speech and how this intersects with the news we consume today.
I heard a lot about the topic of fake news, it started in media writing course when on the first day my teacher in an effort to shock us said she believes there is no such thing as fake news. From there, I learned more about the news from chapters in my mass communications textbook and lectures. The news is also a huge focus of my integrated media course as well. On top of all of this, I decided to attend lectures put on by the University Libraries on fake news, fact checking and citing sources. The textbook chapter on this seemed boring to me, however, it did give a lot good resources and websites to reference as well as specific examples.
I have also heard a lot about verifying sources of information and the textbook only reinforced this and talked about reliable sources. You know when you hear something a bunch and then it just becomes noise and you don’t really listen anymore? This is how I feel about reliable sources, I’ve heard about it too many times recently. This is kind of bad and shouldn’t be this way in our day of digital technology anyone can post and we need to make an effort to know that the things we see are indeed reliable. The book then goes on and talks about ways to verify content social media in particular such as knowing who created it, when it was created and where it was created.
This has overwhelmed me a bit but at its core taught me that journalism is not just someone with a cell phone taking pictures. Journalism is something I’m still figuring out however, I am starting to realize the first amendment is the glue that holds it all together.