Chapter Thirty Nine: Story Lab

 For this week's assignment I decided I wanted to do another story lab. The story lab I'm writing over today is the TedTalk videos over stories and story telling. 

The first TedTalk had a speaker named Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and she spoke about the dangers of a single story. What I took away from this TedTalk was that when people are exposed to one narrative of specific people, other people from the same area will tend to fit that same narrative whether they actually do or not. I know that is really confusing, I just didn't know how else to word it. Basically, when someone is presented with only one side of a story and never sees anything else, they're going to assume that anything that relates to that story in any way is going to be the same as that story. This applies to people and cultures as well.

The second TedTalk had a speaker named Jennifer Barnes who actually worked at OU! I don't know if she still works here, but I digress. She talked about how we develop a connection with fictional characters even though we know they are fictional. She did a study where she asked people how they would feel if someone they barely knew passed away versus their favorite character. She also sectioned the answers off between men and women. Across the board women answered that they would feel more sad if their favorite character died than if a person they saw a few times died. For men, there was not really a statistically meaningful difference. Their responses were almost equal. She concludes by saying that we should challenge ourselves to think about the media we are consuming and use that love we have for our fictional friends to show love to actual people.