The Single Story Response

Reflection on the Quote:

I have chosen to reflect on the first quote because I feel that many people rely on stereotypes to make an opinion on people before they even meet them. I really hate that because that would hurt the feelings of most people and also build social walls between people and cultures. A person relying on just stereotypes would also have a hard time with some people because they rely on the usually negative stereotypes that they fit into. The only story that you allow yourself to see narrows the parts that make a person interesting and unique. When a person is narrowed into a tunnel of a single story they become inhuman and alien to us. If you look at a person then there are several stories layered on top of each other until that pile of stories becomes a unique person that is different from everything else. 

Answering the questions:

3. Media is everywhere and we are influenced by it no matter if we do not rely on it to heavily. Newspapers, radios, TV news, and the internet are the main sources of media. Stories and thoughts travel faster today than fifty years ago. The so called 'news' can be fake unless provided by a reliable source and even then it could be wrong. The media cuts corners nowadays and trims the edges that they deem unimportant which makes it harder to see the full picture.

4. In America we love to spread stories around, we always have words on our tongue that we need to speak. That right there could be seen as a single story sometimes but the truth is that we do make a number of the single stories that are in the air. One of the main single stories on the news would be that all Muslims and people from the Middle East are automatically terrorists or people that only know war. There are no normal citizens that are just trying to live and get along with their lives.

6. As I mentioned in my response to the quote, with the single story we can dehumanize people to the point that we view them as aliens that we could never know what they are thinking. We say that we are not influenced by these single stories but people still say that 'These people are....' or ' They are a ..... that they must......'. I have had people say that to me even though some of them are smart people. With single stories inside our minds we will never reach past the barriers to seeing the people our stories are about as humans on the same level as us. With them as 'lower' beings we can never break down the walls of familiarity.