Week 4 Lab: Ted Talks

I LOVED the TED Talk "The danger of a single story" by Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie. It really made me consider how stories can limit or expand our view or people. In terms of story writing it made me really stop and think about how dimensional the characters in the stories I write are. I think it takes more thought and work to make characters that aren't just stereotypical versions of what we think a cultural group looks like but it is worth it to keep real people from being marginalized into our single stories. More complex characters generally make better stories too.

The TED Talk "Imaginary friends and real-world consequences: parasocial relationships" by Jennifer Barnes was pretty surprising to see how connected people can feel to fictional characters. Both this talk and the one by Adichie show that stories really can high stakes even though intuitively they seem like just something we made up. It's important to remember that the stories we tell really can make an impact on people.

(Photo from Pixabay)