As we move forward into a new decade, it has become increasingly crucial for us to look back at our past and see the stories that have shaped our way of life today. Stories, inarguably, are one of the main factors that affect our way of thought and behavior. The basis of our society, or even civilization itself, is rooted in the fundamental stories that represent us as people. However, we as humans are so easily influenced and governed by the stories around us. The picture books and fables we read in our childhood may have easily shaped or distorted our perspective of the world we know today.

Human beings in and of itself is composed of an endless array of stories, both positive and negative. However, we are naturally unreliable narrators, often choosing to ignore the big picture. Often than not, we solely focus on the negative single stories of our lives, distorting and narrowing the scope of our perspective. Instead of showing the bigger narrative of our lives, we choose to let our failures represent us. These occurrences have become more prevalent in modern culture. Therefore, we must understand thoroughly how single stories affect our lives.

The Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie gave an interesting TED talk about “The Dangers of a Single Story”. She builds her ideas upon the powers of a single narrative and how it affects our daily lives as an individual.

Single stories of modern culture often emphasize how we are different as individuals and rarely relatable. Yet when different versions of a single story is told over and over again, it ends up becoming the truth. With centuries-old roots, these single stories have become a big problem today. We as people are guilty of placing ourselves into a single story that blinds us from a diverse, heterogeneous narrative.

Moreover, single stories sever the connections we have as human equals and brood misconceptions about others. Take, for example, the disconnected cultures of the Middle East, Africa, or Mexico. We have been shaped by mass media to think of war, drugs, poverty, corruption, and violence whenever we think about these foreign countries. These single stories lay birth to stereotypes and conventional views upon people. Thus, we must realize that incomplete single stories shown in common media or information outlets often malign how we look at the world.

In Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED talk, she introduces an interesting concept. Up until today, we have blindly focused on the expansion and facilitation of internetworked communication through multimedia connections. What we haven’t considered was the responsibility and ethical problems that followed technological advancement. “Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a human being. However, stories can also repair that broken dignity.” Adichie expands on the idea that true power is the ability to make a single story the definitive story of that person.

While only an incomplete story, if the single story is shown to others over and over again, the single-story becomes the person. This idea brings forth many big questions we need to think about going into 2020. Should we be responsible for our own stories or the stories we tell? Should mass media corporations be held responsible for telling a single story? Or is it up to us as human equals to facilitate and strive for a world where things are not shaped by a single narrative? “When we reject a single story, when we realize that there is never a single story about any place, we regain a kind of paradise.”

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