"The Dangers of a Single Story"

1. A family's background and culture is probably the biggest influence on how we perceive ideas. If you grow up in a wealthy family, never having to struggle to put a meal on the table or a roof over your head, you will most likely see life that way for everyone else, with no idea that some families are homeless or poor. Maybe you practice a certain religion, if you only know about this specific religion you are probably going to think that your religion is the best on only religion in the world, because that is what you know. If you aren't introduced to other ways of life, and other cultures than your situation, you will be living in a lie, with know clue what is going on around you.

3. I think the media plays a huge role in perpetuating the "single story". A lot of times we only hear one side of the story. For example, in the middle east we only hear about terrorism and other terrible things, when really there are positive things happening. Another example would be in African countries. The media makes it seem like the whole continent is poor, living in poverty, suffering from malnutrition or malaria, etc. We never hear the good stories coming from these places and all of us get these ideas in our head about the people, lifestyle, or geography. We create stereotypes. Its like if the media says there is a big terrorist group in the middle east people assume that everyone from the middle east is a terrorist. when all we hear is one side of the story from the media, that's the only way we view it. when the media plants the seed of a certain idea, in our minds it is very hard to think of the idea/story in a different way.


6. Having a "single story" perspective on life is dangerous because you don't really know the whole story, you only know it from a certain point of view. You won't fully understand what truly happened and you could easily offend someone if you don't know or understand what your talking about.


Quote #1.  "The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story."
 -Chimamanda Adichie

I completely agree with the quote above. It shows that when we only hear one side if a story, we can only think about it one way, favoring one side of the story over the other without even hearing the other side. When all we hear is one side of the story, we think that is the only side and like Chimamanda said, the side of the story we hear, becomes the only story. When one side of a story becomes the only story, we are no longer open to new ideas.