Story Lab: Ted Talks on Storytelling

I took the opportunity to work on a story lab this week and more specifically, I watched the videos that discussed stories and storytelling. The two videos that were provided were incredibly interesting and offered points of view that I had not ever thought about. They discussed conceptions I had experienced and brought up excellent reasons as to why I had them.

The Danger of a Single Story

• this Ted talk was presented by Chimamanda Adichie, a novelist from Nigeria. She discussed the issue of telling, or hearing, a single story. 
• The single story phenomena refers to when we are only presented with one piece of information about an individual or group of people and we use that small bit of knowledge to generalize the group
• Adichie talked about how when she was growing up, one of the people that worked in their home was a young man. All her mother ever told her about him was that his family was very poor, and if she ever refused to finish her dinner she would say something about how much someone like the man's family would appreciate that food. Consequently, she developed the perception that this man and his family had nothing and could make nothing.
• One day her family visited the man's and they showed her a beautiful, intricately woven basket that the man's brother had created.
• This opened a new door in her mind, for she had previously only believed that if you were destitute you could not create or be creative and solely lived for survival.
• This video talked about how powerful a single story could be and  the importance of telling multiple stories
• A story can show how good or bad a people can be so it is important to tell many stories so we can develop a well-rounded perception of the subject of the story

Imaginary Friends and Real-World Consequences

• This talk brings up two questions: Why does anyone spend so much time reading fiction, and what effect does this have on us?
• Specifically, this video delves into a subset of these questions and discusses the relationships people form with these fictional characters.
• Why do we care so much about fictional characters and what effects do the relationships we form with them have on us?
• Parasocial relationships are relationships you form with someone you don't know by consuming media about that person.
• We know that fictional characters are fictional, but we alief that they're real.
• Alief - a gut-level belief-like attitude that may contradict an explicitly held belief
• We care so much about fictional characters because we alief that we truly know them, even though we believe and realistically know that they don't exist
• as a side note, this video used Harry Potter as an example frequently and that really hit home for me since it was my favorite childhood memory

The Deathly Hallows from Harry Potter.

Bibliography

The Danger of a Single Story --> video

Imaginary Friends and Real-World Consequences --> video

Image Information: Deathly Hallows found on deviantart