How Stories Decide (Y)our Future | Carolin Wittmann | TEDxOTHRegensburg

When you hear the word "story", you most likely think of a fictional narrative. But everything is a story, especially our everyday life and world: the gossip at work, the pictures, and reels on social media, our own and collective past. Very little in life actually consists of facts. Due to our emotional and social disposition as humans, we tend to tell events as stories instead of objective reflections. The stories we tell and the way we tell them shape reality much more. The perspective of a story is the logic by which we explain our world, according to which we feel, are biased, weigh up, and act - according to which we thus build the world of tomorrow. However, we are not just the masters of our own life. In our globalized world, we are global players in everything we do and shape our shared world of tomorrow. Filmmaker and director Carolin Wittmann explains why the horizon and perspective of our own story also make global waves and how we can use our world-building power of storytelling to shape a better world of tomorrow - for ourselves and others. Carolin Wittmann is a young director who believes that stories change our world and that narratives of every kind have a much greater impact on our reality than we realize. Since a young age, she has been passionately engaged with the construction and nature of different perspectives through the conception and realization of short films, the writing of poetry, and later a Bachelor of Arts degree in Media Studies with a language scholarship. In 2021, she was honored for her lyrical works as a winner of the German „Lyrix“ prize for young poetry. Her author-film debut „The Threshold Country“ received state funding, was screened in the local round of the Landshut Short Film Festival, and won several awards including Best Director at the Mannheim Arts and Film Festival. The short film, which sensitively shows the interpersonal effects of medially constructed, racist narratives and also calls for social dialog, is to be used in schools and educational institutions in the future to create more understanding for the other side. Wittmann considers films and narratives of all kinds to play an essential role in a peaceful social understanding, as they can break open the social bubbles that divide society horizontally and vertically through media, propagandistic, economic, and one-dimensional social narratives. She is currently living and working in Munich. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx