Week 14 Story Lab

For this week, I decided to do a story lab and watched a Ted talk video about stories and storytelling. It was called "The Danger of a Single Story" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I really enjoyed this Ted talk because it opened up my perception on how a single story doesn't represent a place entirely. She mentioned her personal experience dealing with this when she came to America for college, and that her roommate was shocked to know how well she spoke English since she was from Africa. She talked about how her roommate only had these assumptions of Africa because of the negative and one side things she's read or seen on different media platforms here in the U.S. At the end of the talk, I really liked what she said, "When we reject a single story and realize there's never a single story about a single place, we regain a kind of paradise." In addition, she talked about you could change this by writing the story from the other side's perspective. For instance, instead of starting a story how the British colonized in America start the story off with the Native Americans. Overall, this Ted talk was quite enlightening and made me think about how stories could be changed to bring a new outlook.

A quote by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
(Source: Flickr)

Link: TED Talk "The Danger of a Single Story" by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.