Story Lab Week 6: Ted Talks

https://www.onderwijsvanmorgen.nl/onder-de-indruk-van-ted-talks/

Image information: TED ideas worth spreading this link here goes to a website in another language (not english) i am just using it for the image because it relates to the TED talk videos and that ideas are worth spreading and that is what TED talks do.

Ted Talks: The danger of a Single Story by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

notes: 

• Chimanda grew up in Nigeria
• was an early reader and writer
• her early characters were the same as the British and American Children books
• she thought that books had to have foreigners in them
• was not until she discovered African books, by African writers. and their characters looked like her
• when she came to the USA for college, she saw that her roommate having pity for her: a single story
• she thinks that the single story of Africa we have has westerners comes from western literature
• she says that it is impossible to talk about the single story without taking about power
• an Igbo word comes to her mind, "nkali" it is a noun that loosely translates to "to be greater than another"
• the principle of nkali: how they are told, who tells them,  when they are told, how many stories are told, are really dependent on power
• she had a very happy childhood growing up 
• single stories create stereotypes
• stereotypes are incomplete stories 
• the single story robs people of dignity 
• it makes our recognition of out equal humanity difficult 
• it emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar
• Chimamanda and her publisher started a non profit to build and refurbish libraries (I would assume in Nigeria because that is where they are both from) 

Ted Talks: Imaginary friends an real-world consequences: parasocial relationships by Jennifer Barnes

Notes: 

• realtionships we form with fictional characters
• uses the example of the Harry Potter sieres 
• 235000years of man hours in the harry potter sieres books and movies 
• the amount of time we spend on fictional characters
• why do we care so much about the characters
• Parasocial relationships 
• a relationship we form that we dont actually know, just from the information that we read about them
• we connect with them and or celeberties through tradional media and now social media
• logically we know that the characters do not know us
• alief is an anutomatic gut level belief like attitude that may contradict an explicity held belief (gendler, 2008)
• what effects do these realtionships have on us
• fan activisim 
• reading fiction may teach us empathy