Story Lab: Week 10, Ted Talks

The Danger of a Single Story
By: Chimamanda Adichie

• The first Ted Talk was very interesting, it taught me that we are not confined to write about what we have read about. We can change and make every single story our own with our own imagination. Not everyone is a "single story," there is much more to people and to a story than one aspect of it. So many people are thought of as single stories and are often thought of as only having one characteristic. Media can play a large part in forming our single stories, when we look at stories with only one point of view we are most often wrong. There is much more to people and places than one view or what we think we know. People are much more than one thing and if all people see are one thing then those other people become that one thing. One story is not representative of an entire population or ethnicity. 

Imaginary Friends and Real Life Consequences 

By: Jennifer Barnes

• We form para-social relationships with fictional characters or even famous people that we have watched on reality television or seen on social media. We become involved in their lives and feel as if we know them. On the flip side, these people do not know you at all but sometimes we feel as if they do. We have a subconscious belief that these people are real and that our logic is fake. We get to this point because we feel as if we see them constantly and know so much about their personal lives, in the past this is what constituted as having a relationship with someone. When someone dies that we have a fictional attachment to, we become emotionally upset at their loss. When thinking of someone we do not know that well and thinking if they were to die, how upset would we be. This is comparison to someone we like fictionally we were more upset over them dying then someone we actually know. 

A fictional character I feel like i know, Olivia Pope.