Single Stories

The single story is very dangerous in society today. Our culture at large runs on single stories, specifically in 2014, where everything you want and more is available to you at hand. So negative and/or limiting single stories have a strong effect on the subject at large. A single story is dynamic and varies in subject matter. For instances a single story can be about, human physical appearance, cognitive abilities, international bias, etc. The consequences of single stories can vary from minimal to extremely damaging. A single story that results in minimal damage could hurt someones feelings, but extreme damage could lead to a young girl's anorexia. The media's affects the likelihood of a single story solidifying and becoming imbued into our cognition. Today, our technology exceeds the past, as we can communicate with others across the world adding to the damage a single story can cause. One example of this is that majority of websites on the web are in English, unable to be accessed by those of minority culture. Through globalization the majority culture's influence over communication barriers has limited websites to minorities based on design and language availability.
In the future, I believe our generation as a whole will be more open minded as our education was based off of the scientific method. For this reason, our generation considers if the resource is credible and reliable. Our generation investigates issues and continues to develop formal operations thinking. Although we are not perfect, majority of us strive and continue to influence younger generations.

Before moving to Columbus, I had never encountered such poverty and homeless people. Honestly, I thought that homeless were not very common beside the statistics. In my hometown, not everyone is rich, but they are for the most part pretty well off. Not saying there wasn't poor families, but they could afford the essentials for basic survival. Majority of my hometown inhabitants are considered working class or lower middle class with few being higher-middle class.Before I came to college I was sheltered and although I knew about poverty and homeless people I had never experienced it. As soon as I met a true homeless person did I experienced culture shock. Now, I often sympathize for homeless youth. Not only is this an extremely damaging issue to individuals, families, and culture at large, but we learned from the single story that if we don't see it, it doesn't exist.
It is cowardly, but it is this that I have hope. More emerging adults, from my peers at Ohio State, that I have talked to have at least meet individuals of different culture, ethnicity, race, SES, etc. and/or have traveled abroad. We are receiving a more informed and global view of the world from through our own experiences diminishing the power of the single story.