The COVID-19 pandemic has shed fresh light on the ways that social media and digital technologies can be effectively harnessed to support relationship-based social work practice. However, it has also highlighted the complex risks, ethics and practical challenges that such technologies pose.
This book helps practitioners and students navigate this complex terrain and explore and build upon its multiple opportunities. It uses real-life examples to examine how practitioners can assess the impact of new technologies on their professional conduct and use them in a way that enhance public confidence and relationship-based practice.
The authors explore how digital technologies can support multiple areas of service including social work with children, families and adults, mental health social work, youth justice and working with online communities. They also consider regulatory questions and provide a roadmap for good practice.
47 4 Social media data Adrian Tear and Humphrey Southall Introduction As the ‘participatory’ Web 2.0 model has supplanted ‘publication’ on the World Wide Web, several rapidly evolving sites and applications, such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Wikipedia and YouTube, have promoted the creation and enabled, to varying extents, the retrieval of increasingly large volumes of user-generated content. Some of these human-made digital artefacts consisting of text, shared web links, audio, image or video files are publicly posted allowing widespread, although seldom
The relationship between crime and social media has become an increasingly important topic in a networked world. However, the use of social media in relation to violent crime is little understood. This unique book, by an expert in the field, addresses this gap by analysing what those involved in homicide do with social media.
Using three international cases in which perpetrators confessed to homicide on social media, it investigates the practices of those involved, providing a groundbreaking conceptual framework of use to criminologists. It argues that such confessions convey important insights not only into the individual offender but also the social and cultural context of contemporary homicide.
121 EIGHT Social media for students in practice Joanne Westwood Introduction This chapter examines social media in social work practice contexts and settings and explores how agencies, organisations and practitioners can ensure that it is used safely. In social work practice, the barriers to engagement with social media and, in particular, the concerns about practitioner, service user and carer privacy and confidentiality are amplified. This chapter explores the opportunities that social media presents in practice contexts, as well as the possible threats
113 5 Social media and mental health social work Ruth Allen and Peter Buzzi Social media: our modern social and emotional environment The relationship between social media and mental health is often dominated by a discourse of risk and negative outcomes. From the mental health consequences of ‘overuse’ of social media (Pantic et al, 2012), to the potential psychological and emotional consequences of ‘cyberbullying’ and ‘trolling’ of adults and children and young people, to the risks associated with online sites that promote self-harm or suicide (Guardian
93 4 Social media and adult social work Peter Buzzi and Sharon Allen Introduction One of the primary objectives of adult social work is to support and safeguard adults in order to promote individual autonomy, increase and maximise individual choice, and enhance people’s health and wellbeing while ensuring their safety and protection. Adults who access services are often challenged by complex needs and burdened by social stereotypes and stigma that aggravate their difficulties; these include individual vulnerability and human frailty, isolation, social
177 8 Social media and social work regulation Claudia Megele, Lyn Romeo and Peter Buzzi Introduction The effective regulation of professionalism and digital practice in an increasingly mediated world, one dominated by a rapidly changing socio-technological, cultural and practice landscape, presents significant and evolving challenges and opportunities spanning from frontline practice to strategic management of services and from education to employment and regulation of social work. However, the notion of digital practice in social work is relatively new
technology. Given the articulation of communication as conversation in Pask’s cybernetics, it is social media, that is, communication technologies that privilege interaction over direct broadcasting, that I will discuss here. Rather than examining the potential of existing platforms, such as Facebook, for self-organisation, I want to consider how bespoke, alternative social media might support and reinforce collective self-organising processes. The aim here is to provide an outline of the organisational (rather than technical) functions that such a social media platform
19 2 Digital professionalism and social media ethics Claudia Megele and Peter Buzzi Introduction Digital and social media technologies have created new opportunities and ways of communicating, seeing, thinking, living and being. They have transformed our way of thinking about and relating to technology, as well as about ourselves and how we relate to others. Although these changes offer unprecedented opportunities, they are also disruptive: they break with the past and transform existing norms, values and behaviours and therefore entail new and
133 6 Social media and youth justice: challenges and possibilities for practice Naomi Thompson and Ian Joseph Introduction This chapter begins by exposing the lack of literature that exists relating to youth justice and social media. Current debates about young people, crime and social media are explored and critiqued. Following this, examples of social media in practice are presented. The first provides an example of young people using social media to evade the police and community orders within their local areas, demonstrating the importance of
