Smart welfare and slow digital poverty: the new face of social work

Abstract

ABSTRACT The arrival of the pandemic which has affected the entire world, in addition to spreading fear due to the initial inability to manage the health crisis, has increased the fluidity and uncertainty in today’s society. The system of social security itself has not only changed its contents, combining primordial material welfare with a relational type of well-being, but also its form. We have gone from the more conventional form of face-to-face relationships to the more innovative methods making us talk about e-welfare with the use of digital technology. If on the one hand the latter has removed the space-time barriers, connoting itself as smart welfare, on the other hand it has generated a digital divide, with the creation of the digitally poor. During the pandemic, schools, health care and social services have had to invent new operational methods on an experimental level by using cutting-edge organisations to meet their new needs. The aim of the article is therefore to shed light on these changes which are taking place by highlighting the operational and ethical implications of digitalisation in order to find a new approach to social work which has been seen as ‘a beacon in the night of the pandemic’.