Week 4 Lab

I decided to write my post over the "Ted Talks videos"  consisting of the video "The danger of a single story" and "Imaginary friends and real-world consequences: parasocial relationships". Concerning the first video, I found it extremely thought provoking and necessary. The theme of a single story is the term the speaker uses to express the act of boxing people and groups into a small mental  box, limiting who they can be. Continually show a people group as one thing, repeatedly, and eventually they will become this in your mind. This is so dangerous because what begins as an innocent story quickly festers into a negative bias, stereotype or even racism. The speaker closed by encouraging the audience to reject the single story, because when we do, we regain a kind of paradise.
Regarding the second ted talk, the main idea is what roles fictional characters have that actually impact our real lives. The speaker calculated the amount of time mankind has spent reading and watching Harry Potter which resulted in an absurdly large number of years that spanned farther than mankind itself. She then showed statistics that supported the idea which states that we have more grief towards fictional characters than we have for real strangers. The speaker encourages us to read fiction and use our love for these characters and stories to impact the world around us. The line that really caught my attention was when she asked the audience if the issue was a matter of treating fictional characters like real people, or the fact that we treat real people like celebrities as if they are fictional characters.

                                                                 Imagination Image