I had no idea what to expect when I signed up for English 302.  I took this class because it fulfilled a requirement for the IT minor.  I had taken a team based learning class before, Biochem 394 RI.  I didn’t like it because it was a poorly thought out and poorly run class that nobody asked for  and only existed because the university now requires all majors to have a team based learning class.  On the first day, I realized that I had never taken a class with the type of people in the room.  Most of my classes have been in the Biochem department.  Other than that, I have taken classes in the history and political science departments, which have some overlap.  Outside of that, the classes I have taken have been GenEds, and I didn’t interact with the people in them for the most part.  All of a sudden, I was sitting in a room populated, for the most part, by English majors.

Not only that, I had to get to know the people in the class.  There were discussions every class.  We took multiple viewpoints to come to a consensus and learn about topics I had never thought much about, let alone studied.  I came to like this class more than a lot of what I have taken at UMass.  It was interesting to have a class centered on people and interaction rather than a lecture and note taking.  I started out taking a lot of notes lest something appear on a test that I hadn’t written down.  I ended up not taking notes and listening most of the time.  I felt that I got more out of the class that way.

The course content itself was more interesting than I thought it would be.  There was a lot of theoretical discussion about how everyday things were affecting the way we understand and interact with other people.  That was fun for me.  It had never occurred to me that social media and the accompanied mindset changed how we deal with one another.  People spend a lot of time taking pictures at parties rather than just partying, in the traditional sense.

Our discussions about our relationship with big business as consumers were interesting.  They made me look at products and companies differently.  Now, I look at new ideas and products and immediately ask questions.  Who owns this company?  How are they going to make money?  Is this something I really need?  Could there be negatives associated with using this?  I would only decide how I felt about a new product after I could answer all of these questions to a satisfactory degree.  Once I got to that point, it started to sound a lot more like the type of inquiry I was used to hearing in a science class.  That blurring of the lines was the vest part of my experience in English 302.

Our discussion about Google was an interesting one.  Along with the readings, it made me very suspicious of Google.  The company has gotten more fervent about involving itself in its customers everyday lives.  I, for one, do not want my every activity tracked and recorded.  The excuse that it will make my buying experience more convenient doesn’t do it for me.  If I want to buy a pair of shoes, I will go look for shoes.  I don’t want to have banners following me around trying to subliminally tell me I should go buy some Nikes.

I don’t like the idea of big data.  I don’t like a large company seeing me as a valuable entry in a spreadsheet.  I don’t like having my privacy smashed to bits in the name of conveniences I didn’t ask for and don’t want.  Every time I see a new Google product, I am suspicious rather than interested.  What do they really want from me?  How am I going to be exploited next?

I love the convenience Google offers.  They are my first choice when I want to learn about something.  There have been several projects I simply could not have done without Google Drive.  Having said that, I am beginning to wonder if these conveniences are worth the cost of all of my privacy.  I am not a particularly interesting person to Google.  I don’t buy much online, meaning I am not worth much as a statistic.  I am not the target demographic for literally anything they can sell to me.  All the same, I still don’t like a large company being able to read and record anything they want about me.

The readings we did on neoliberalism really made me think.  For the past thirty years, America has been the epicenter of a slash-and-burn style capitalism that concentrates wealth.  This is great news if you are a CEO or a corporate raider, but terrible news for everyone else.  All social welfare has taken a hit, which is justified by the age old “times are tough” excuse.  Yet, during these supposedly hard times, the wealthiest people in the country have confusingly managed to keep getting wealthier.

Neoliberalism has also changed the way the justice system works.  Reagan invented racist myths, such as the crack baby and the welfare queen, in order to start the war on drugs and mass incarceration.  Thirty years later, the United States has more prisoners than any other country in the world and drugs are still as cheap and accessible as ever.  Neoliberalism has given us inexplicably harsh sentences for nonviolent petty drug offenders, which have filled our prisons with people who aren’t dangerous and managed to devastate their families and neighborhoods without making anybody any safer.  The police have embraced the “war” part of the war on drugs.  They now have military equipment and kill more people a year than ever before.  With all of this in mind, I think it’s past time we took a hard look at neoliberalism and made some changes.