For my TED Talk I am going to talk about the lack of empathy in modern society. I’ve been working on my talk for a decent amount of time now and am comfortable and passionate about the topic. I want to talk about the fact that we as a society do not have the ability to respect, understand or share the feelings and emotions of other people. I plan to model part of my talk off of a video portion of a talk that a teen in Hershey Pennsylvania did. Today I began the first step in the formation of this video portion in my talk. My plan is to have a large number of my peers and classmates come to my house next Monday and take a picture holding a piece of paper over their face. On the paper they will write down a big secret, something they are struggling with, something nobody knows about them or anything along those lines. I told my classmates it could be something funny or something really serious, whatever they felt they wanted to get off their chest. To risk people fearing me seeing their secret I also gave the option of the self-timer button on my camera or emailing me pictures at the email account [email protected] which I made specifically for this project. After I’ve collected all of the pictures, I’m going to edit them and put them together in a video. The reason for editing the pictures isn’t so that they look nice. I am editing the pictures so that all of the paper-holders are completely unrecognizable. The reason for making sure the subjects of the photos can’t be recognized is because the purpose isn’t that those specific people have a secret, its that people in general have struggles and secrets that nobody knows about. My hope is that learning that other people struggle will really open our eyes to the fact that we should be empathetic to all people because you never really know what somebody is dealing with. I spread the word today by making a Facebook group called “Cat’s TED Empathy Project” with an event that had the date and time I wanted everyone to come and my address. I invited a large portion of my friends list on Facebook and invited classmates to invite their friends to the page as well to get the word out. I opened my group not only to students at my high school, but friends I have at other high schools as well, so I am hoping to have a good turnout and good results in my video in addition to the other portions of my talk. I’m really glad the TED club has given me a chance to explore and promote empathy in such a welcoming environment and I’m very very excited to give my talk in June!