5 ways to live (and thrive) while social distancing

The novel coronavirus has dramatically changed how we spend time and share physical and virtual space with each other. On Friday, March 27, conflict mediator and author Priya Parker joined head of TED Chris Anderson and current affairs curator Whitney Pennington Rodgers on TED Connects to discuss what we all can do to stay connected and sustain relationships while apart during the pandemic. Here’s some advice to help you get through this uncertain time:

Bring intention to planning a virtual gathering

As platforms like Zoom, Slack and email become more integrated into our lives, it’s clear that technology will play an important role in helping us keep in touch. Whether you’re organizing a Zoom dinner party or Facetiming a friend, Parker invites us to consider how we can elevate the conversation beyond just check-ins. In planning a virtual gathering, ask:

• Who’s joining and why?
• What are your community’s needs?
• What’s the reason you’re coming together?

As the pandemic evolves, these needs will likely shift. Stay attuned to the kinds of connections your communities are seeking.

Include fun themes to elevate your digital get-togethers

Parker suggests centering your gatherings around themes or activities to encourage more meaningful and purposeful conversations. Incorporate elements of the physical world to create a shared experience, like asking everyone to wear a funny costume or making the same recipe together. Though screens don’t quite replace the energy of in-person gatherings, we can still strengthen community bonds by reminding ourselves that there are real people on the other end of our devices.

Set healthy boundaries to maintain wellbeing

As we’re figuring out the best way to exist in the digital world, it’s also crucial we put in the effort to meaningfully connect with those we’re quarantining with. The distinctions between time to work, socialize and rest can grow blurrier by the day, so be sure to set boundaries and ground rules with those you live with. In having this conversation with your roommates, family or partner, reflect on these prompts:

• How do you want to distinguish time spent together versus apart?
• How do you want to share time together?
• Since we look at screens most of the day, could it be helpful to set no-screen times or brainstorm new, non-digital ways to hang out?

Allow yourself to reflect on the unknown

It’s important to acknowledge that this is not a normal time, Parker says. The coronavirus pandemic has transformed the world, and as a global society we’ll experience the reverberations of this period as they ripple across every sector of human life. Make sure to create space for those conversations, too.

Take time to wander through the unknown, to talk about how we are being changed — individually and collectively — by this shared experience. It’s perfectly normal to feel worried, vulnerable, even existential, and this may be a great time to lean into those feelings and think about what really matters to you.

Recognize the power and feeling community brings — no matter the size

While the coronavirus pandemic has physically isolated many of us from each other, our ingenuity and resilience ensures that we can still build and forge community together. Across the world, people are gathering in new and amazing ways to set up “care-mongering” support groups, sing with their neighbors, take ceramics classes, knit together and break bread.

Now is the time to discover (or rediscover) the value and power of community. We are all members of many different communities: our neighborhoods, families, countries, faith circles and so on. Though we’re living in unprecedented times of social isolation, we can forge stronger bonds by gathering in ways that reflect our best values and principles. In the United Kingdom, a recent campaign asked people across the country to go outside at a synchronized time and collectively applaud health workers on the frontlines of the crisis; a similar effort was made across India to ring bells in honor of the ill and those caring for them. During this crisis and beyond, we can use thoughtful ritual-making to transform our unease and isolation into community bonding.

“Gathering is contagious,” Parker says. “These small, simple ideas allow people to feel like we can shape some amount — even a small amount — of our collective reality together.”

Looking for more tips, advice and wisdom? Watch the full conversation with Priya below:

Social media is a threat to democracy: Carole Cadwalladr speaks at TED2019

Journalist Carole Cadwalladr explores how social media platforms like Facebook exerted an unprecedented influence on voters in the Brexit referendum and the 2016 US presidential election. She speaks during Session 1 of TED2019: Bigger Than Us, on April 15, 2019 in Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Photo: Bret Hartman / TED)

The day after the Brexit referendum, British journalist (and recently announced Pulitzer Prize finalist) Carole Cadwalladr went to her home region of South Wales to investigate why so many voters had elected to leave the European Union.

She asked residents of the traditionally left-wing town of Ebbw Vale, a place newly rejuvenated by EU investment, why they had voted to leave. They talked about wanting to take back control — a Vote Leave campaign slogan — and being fed up with immigrants and refugees.

Cadwalladr was taken aback. “Walking around, I didn’t meet any immigrants or refugees,” she says. “I met one Polish woman who told me she was practically the only foreigner in town. When I checked the figures, I discovered that Ebbw Vale actually has one of the lowest rates of immigration in the country. So I was just a bit baffled, because I couldn’t really understand where people were getting their information from.”

A reader from the area got in touch with her after her story ran, to explain that she had seen things on Facebook, which she described to Cadwalladr as “quite scary stuff about immigration, and especially about Turkey.” This was misinformation that Cadwalladr was familiar with — the lie that Turkey was going to join the EU, accompanied by the suggestion that its population of 76 million people would promptly emigrate to current member states.

She describes trying to find evidence of this content on Facebook: “There’s no archive of ads that people see, or what had been pushed into their news feeds. No trace of anything … This entire referendum took place in darkness because it took place on Facebook.” And Mark Zuckerburg has refused multiple requests from the British parliament to come and answer questions about these ad campaigns and the data used to create them, she says.

“What I and other journalists have uncovered is that multiple crimes took place during the referendum, and they took place on Facebook,” Cadwalladr says.

The amount of money you can spend on an election is limited by law in Britain, to prevent “buying” votes. It has been found that the Vote Leave campaign laundered £750,000 shortly before the referendum, which they spent on these online disinformation campaigns.

“This was the biggest electoral fraud in Britain for a hundred years, in a once-in-a-generation vote that hinged on just 1 percent of the electorate,” Cadwalladr says.

Cadwalladr embarked on a complex and painstaking investigation into the ad campaigns used in the referendum. After spending months tracking down an ex-employee, Christopher Wylie, she found that a company called Cambridge Analytica “had profiled people politically in order to understand their individual fears, to better target them with Facebook ads, and it did this by illicitly harvesting the profiles of 87 million people from Facebook.”

Despite legal threats from both Cambridge Analytica and Facebook, Cadwalladr and her colleagues went public with their findings, publishing them in the Observer.

“Facebook: you were on the wrong side of history in that,” Cadwalladr says. “And you are on the wrong side of history in this. In refusing to give us the answers that we need. And that is why I am here. To address you directly. The gods of Silicon Valley; Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg and Larry Page and Sergey Brin and Jack Dorsey, and your employees and your investors, too … We are what happens to a western democracy when a hundred years of electoral laws are disrupted by technology … What the Brexit vote demonstrates is that liberal democracy is broken, and you broke it.”

Cadwalladr offers a challenge to tech companies: “It is not about left or right, or Leave or Remain, or Trump or not. It’s about whether it’s actually possible to have a free and fair election ever again. As it stands, I don’t think it is. And so my question to you is: Is this what you want? Is this how you want history to remember you? As the handmaidens to authoritarianism that is on the rise all across the world? You set out to connect people and you are refusing to acknowledge that the same technology is now driving us apart.”

And for everyone else, Cadwalladr has a call to action: “Democracy is not guaranteed, and it is not inevitable. And we have to fight. And we have to win. And we cannot let these tech companies have this unchecked power. It’s up to us: you, me and all of us. We are the ones who have to take back control.”

Discover 8 big ideas for global change — as they’re revealed live at TED2019

You’ve watched lots of TED Talks. But have you ever watched a full session of the TED Conference, from beginning to end?

On Tuesday, April 16, 2019, at 8pm ET/5pm PT, you’re invited to join us for a full session of talks from TED2019, beamed live to you from our theater in Vancouver, British Columbia. This session, themed “Audacity,” is a very special one — during it, we’ll be revealing the eight projects for global change that will receive support through The Audacious Project. These ideas are big: The projects and the amazing human beings who will tell you about them have been distilled from 1,500 applications, and they take on some of the toughest challenges humanity faces. We believe that, collectively, they stand to change entire systems and transform million of lives for the better.

Come join us for this session — watch on Twitter @TEDTalks and chime in on the conversation with TED fans and others around the world. Hear these powerful talks and find out how you can get involved in putting these ideas into action.

Watch the session here on April 16 at 8pm ET/5pm PT »