The Obliteration of Alienation

According to Leyton, the Industrial Revolution and the more recent technological revolution intensified the sense f alienation among many workers from different classes in society. Elliot Leyton states that the Industrial Revolution was positive in that it liberated people and freed them from "unthinkable slaveries of caste, race, gender, and class. On the other hand, however, they were alienated from "the product of their work, their fellow men who had become competitors in the market, and from their own selves".
MSF is an organization that stands for Medecins sans Frontiers, which literally means doctors without borders. It is an international groupof physicians who dedicated their lives to helping victims of genocide, war, disasters, and epidemics, often occuring in Third World countries. The alienation motivates MSF doctors because they can relate to the alientated persons. They too felt like non-persons when trapped in their dull, previous lives. Membership into the MSF program actually disalienates individuals. It liberates them as human beings, allows them to explore fully their potential as they seize the opportunity to act. They also construct their identities by witnessing atrocity and fear, treating vile diseases, healing terrible wounds, digging the latrine, and delivering clean water.
It is important that they do not consider themselves heroes, even though they very well may be. Since they do not brag about what they do, it is easier for people to be more appreciative of them.

The Next University Drive Thru U: Higher Education for People Who Mean Business

Online universities such as the University of Phoenix transform the meaning of the word campus. People who attend online universities do not have a campus so to speak. Their "campus" is their home. They will never fully understand the feeling of attending an actual college or university.
Negatives and downfalls of online universities aside from the college experience is the distractions. I can only imaging how distracting taking college courses at home would be. When in class sitting at a desk it is so much easier to concentrate. For instance, think how distracted one may get while doing homework. Now imagine not only doing the homework at home, but also taking the courses at home as well. Also, having an online college degree may not look as well as an actual college or university degree when it comes to looking for a career after college.
There are also many advantages for the online universities which are as follows: time, affordable, accessible, etc. The online university is accessible throughout the day and night, while an actual college or university has hours of operation. This allows the student to work on papers and take class when it is convenient for them. Also, while the average college student pays close to $22,000 a year for college, the online university is only $12,000 which adds up to a $10,000 difference. Also, online universities are usually a two year degree, instead of a traditional four year program.
John Sperling was the creator of the University of Phoenix. He made the University of Phoenix with the working parent in mind. Working is hard enough to do while attending college, let alone having a family on top of that. Now parents can have a full time job and still have the time to take college courses online when it is convenient for them.

Media Magic: Making Class Invisible

When reading this selection, it was extremely shocking to me that there are forty million people living in poverty in America alone. To think that forty million povished Americans can fill seven northeast states is mind-blowing. Gregory Mantsios states "in those instances when inequities are revealed, we are provided with messages that obscure the nature of class realities and blame the victims of class-dominated society for their own plight."
Who provides these messages? Mainly, the media. Another astounding statistic is that the average American will watch twenty-eight hours of television a week! And this number does not even include watching movies. The media also hands out messages in the form of periodicals, newspapers, journals, and magazines. While there are forty million povished Americans, the middle and upper class are, for the most part, unaware of how serious the situations actually are. This is done by the media desensitizing the information provided to us.
The media desensitizes the poverty in America by reducing the poverty to a number. In this way, it is providing the "wealthy" with quantity, but not quality. We have no idea how serious this situation actually is. We do not live through the suffering, indignities, and misery that they live through each and every day. The only way we would have any slight idea is through information from the media. Since they desensitize the information, we think of the issue and nothing, and that provides for a list of more troubling issues. Also, by giving reducing the issue to a quantitative number, it makes the povished Americans faceless.
The media also portrays the idea to Americans that the poor only have themselves to blame for their life of misery. They focus in on typical black urban communities or women with attitudes that lead to divorce or single-motherhood. While these examples can sometimes be true, the idea as a whole is not realistic. Many Americans work just as hard, they simply did not his the genetic lottery or had the money to afford college. This is not their fault by any means. Telling the poor that they are the ones to be blamed puts a negative image in the minds of middle and upper class Americans. If only the media would be more realistic in their explanations and choices of words, maybe the poverty number could be lowered in some instances, or at least be more recognized by the wealthy in America.