Ted Talk by OU Professor Jennifer Barnes -
I thought that this Ted Talk was extremely cool because I had Jennifer Barnes as my Lifespan Development professor last spring. She was an amazing professor and a better person. In her Ted talk she focuses on the idea of fictional characters and what effects they can have on us as people. She highlights para-social relationships and how we as humans feel about celebrities/fictional characters even though they are unaware of our existence. We feel as if we know that person and everything about their lives even though often times they are fictional characters. She says that this relationship can often times mean more to people than casual relationships that we have with real people. I can definitely agree with what she says because I myself have dealt with para-social relationships. I truly realized this when my favorite person in the world other than my family, Kobe Bryant, passed away. I was struck with immense grief and pain even though he did not know of my existence nor had I ever met him. I was crying my eyes out for weeks and still think about him nearly every day. This is the power of para-social relationships, and Professor Barnes that sometimes these relationships can transform us into more empathetical people.
Ted Talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie -
This was an amazing Ted talk that focused on the issues that come with telling a single story. Chimamanda talks about the struggles that she has dealt with when coming to America and the stereotypes that she was faced with by her American colleagues, simply because they had only heard negative stories about her home nation of Nigeria. She emphasizes the need to tell multiple stories, telling the good with the bad, rather than just telling the bad. The image that the media portrays about a certain place often times is so one sided that it brainwashes the viewer into believing anything other than what they are told. The issues with telling only one story can lead to stereotypes. She says, "A single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with sterotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete." A single story can only tell so much of the entire story, and whoever is hearing the story is not being told the bigger picture. This is by far one of the best Ted talks I have ever heard, and it really opened my eyes about stereotypes and especially the media.
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