The Outcome of My TED Talk Pitch
Preparing a pitch on desensitization to share with my leadership class allowed me the opportunity to do a lot of process work and focus in on certain aspects of my topic that I had previously overlooked. In my last post I had mentioned that I want to more closely examine empathy in the context of desensitization and it was through preparing this pitch that I had come to focus on this. Sharing my ideas with my classmates helped me to better articulate my main points and specify what started out as a very broad topic. Watching the other presentations also helped me to further solidify my own idea. Izzy's suggestion of the dark underlying messages of Disney films made me think about how we normalize more than just violence, war, and suffering, but also societal and gender expectations. Likely because of the insight researching my own topic has given me, I viewed Izzy's presentation with the perspective that being constantly exposed to these Disney films that communicate negative messages about gender, race, body image, etc., has allowed us to normalize and become desensitized to some of these values in society around us. From this I have gained yet another idea of a new direction in which I could take my TED Talk.
Two other presentations that connected to and presented new view points in regards to my own topic were given by Kimia and Mia. Kimia's topic of kindness and how we need to be more willing to go out of our way to be kind to those around us reminded me of my own call for more empathetic action. I liked what Kimia said about all acts of kindness being equal, that no one act is worth more than another. This gave me ideas about how I can structure my own call of action within my TED Talk to be something that starts out as small and easy for most people to do. I also thought that Mia's presentation on how our devices make us unhappy brought up a lot of great points that connected to my own topic. Her articulation of how our phones promote superficiality and narcissism within ourselves made me think about how this may be part of the reason for the desensitization that I am discussing in my TED Talk. The increasing levels of narcissism that Mia mentioned match the study that I wrote about in my last post, which indicates that this narcissistic trend matches the time frame of the decline in empathy levels over the last 30 years. The study did not find conclusive answers to explain these results but I think that Mia's presentation posed an interesting theory.
I received mainly validating responses from my classmates in response to my own presentation. For the most part they said that they liked the topic and what I planned to do with it. Izzy suggested that I use more concrete examples to illustrate my point and I agree that doing so will make my TED Talk more effective in terms of connecting with my audience. The way in which I think I will go about doing this is to show a humanitarian commercial that most of my audience would be familiar with. After showing them the commercial I would pose three questions: 1) How many of you have seen this commercial or one similar to it? 2) How many of you understood what the commercial was asking you to do? 3) How many of you actually did this? My assumption would be that not many students would have actually answered the call to action presented to them through the commercial, despite likely having all the resources to do so.
This commercial from World Vision is one that I hope many students will be familiar with (or at least another world vision commercial). I like this video for the purpose I previously mentioned because the call to action is very simple and the potential outcomes for answering that call are clearly depicted. Showing this as a part of my presentation could give a concrete example of how we have the tools to make change, but because we are often desensitized to the content on our screens, we don't hold ourselves accountable for enacting said change.
Two other presentations that connected to and presented new view points in regards to my own topic were given by Kimia and Mia. Kimia's topic of kindness and how we need to be more willing to go out of our way to be kind to those around us reminded me of my own call for more empathetic action. I liked what Kimia said about all acts of kindness being equal, that no one act is worth more than another. This gave me ideas about how I can structure my own call of action within my TED Talk to be something that starts out as small and easy for most people to do. I also thought that Mia's presentation on how our devices make us unhappy brought up a lot of great points that connected to my own topic. Her articulation of how our phones promote superficiality and narcissism within ourselves made me think about how this may be part of the reason for the desensitization that I am discussing in my TED Talk. The increasing levels of narcissism that Mia mentioned match the study that I wrote about in my last post, which indicates that this narcissistic trend matches the time frame of the decline in empathy levels over the last 30 years. The study did not find conclusive answers to explain these results but I think that Mia's presentation posed an interesting theory.
I received mainly validating responses from my classmates in response to my own presentation. For the most part they said that they liked the topic and what I planned to do with it. Izzy suggested that I use more concrete examples to illustrate my point and I agree that doing so will make my TED Talk more effective in terms of connecting with my audience. The way in which I think I will go about doing this is to show a humanitarian commercial that most of my audience would be familiar with. After showing them the commercial I would pose three questions: 1) How many of you have seen this commercial or one similar to it? 2) How many of you understood what the commercial was asking you to do? 3) How many of you actually did this? My assumption would be that not many students would have actually answered the call to action presented to them through the commercial, despite likely having all the resources to do so.
This commercial from World Vision is one that I hope many students will be familiar with (or at least another world vision commercial). I like this video for the purpose I previously mentioned because the call to action is very simple and the potential outcomes for answering that call are clearly depicted. Showing this as a part of my presentation could give a concrete example of how we have the tools to make change, but because we are often desensitized to the content on our screens, we don't hold ourselves accountable for enacting said change.
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