Story Laboratory: TED Talks About Stories

In "The Danger of a Single Story," the TED Talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Chimamanda discusses how people can easily have a narrow sited view on another culture or different types of people due to only being shown one point of view. People often only see one news source or one type of narrative about people of different countries and can have an opinion on what these people are like without ever actually observing them and seeing how life really is. To me this is very similar to the saying "don't judge a book by it's cover" as people often judge others by the first story or impression they have of them and this can lead to warped opinions and thoughts about people from different places and different cultures. To me this is a major problem today due to the mass use of social media. Too often people jump to opinions of others based off of one tweet that could be fake news, a joke, or just taken out of context. How can we truly know what someone means from one tweet?

Jennifer Barnes discusses how we can become connected to fictional characters or celebrities in her talk "Imaginary Friends and Real-World Consequences: Parasocial Relationships." She starts by informing us just how much fiction is consumed by people. The astounding number shows how much people care about stories that we know aren't true but want to know more about anyways. Then, in her study, we come to find out that people would often be impacted more by the death of a fictional character than a random acquaintance. This also proves true for celebrities that we get to know through twitter and interviews. We believe that we actually know the character or celebrity even though they don't know us. The danger in this is that we are thinking in a way that is illogical. I think this can also go back to my previous point that twitter can lead us to get into arguments on behalf of the people we "stan" which is ridiculous and shows the combative and abusive nature that twitter has right now.

Twitter