Week 4 Storylab

 I had the wonderful opportunity to listen to the TED talk videos: The danger of a single story by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Imaginary friends and real-world consequences by Jennifer Barnes. 

The danger of a single story was very eye-opening for me. I can see now how stories appear one-sided and we begin to think only in this way. I think the story of Chimamanda's roommate was a very accurate representation of how most American's would view Nigerian people. We have read stories and articles about all of the horrible things in Nigeria, but we have read very little of the good things. Oftentimes we do unintentionally formulate a very narrow viewpoint, and it is sad quite frankly. Our world has never been a simple place, so our thinking must reflect that. We should read stories that are out of our element. We should explore other sides of stories. We should expand our thinking. One thing that stuck out to me in this video was the fact that Chimamanda kept saying "what if..". What if we cultured ourselves? What if we didn't fall victim to the single story. 

Imaginary friends and real-world consequences was very interesting to me. The characters that we write in stories really do have a great impact on the people who read our stories. I think that is something that authors sometimes forget. We become so invested in a story that we literally have emotional connections with the characters. Like Jennifer said, some readings literally grieve the loss of the characters because they felt like they "knew" this made up character. This again goes to show how powerful our stories really are and the reach that they have on those around us. I personally think writing is a form of art, because they quite literally mold together this beautiful story with all of these elaborate details and plotlines. It really is something to think about when we are creating these stories even in this class! 


This photo is by TED, please know this is not the actual picture of the two speakers that I watched for this assignment just one that was free to use

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