What is the role of hypertechnology in social work today?

Abstract

There is little doubt that professional communication in social work is being transformed by hypertechnology (Gandy & Tepperman, 1990; Howard, 1995; Saleebey, 1991). Discussions about hypertechnology in the social work literature have for the most part focused on one application at a time on a piecemeal basis, reviewing separate or distinct applications of hardware or software. There has been comparatively little examination of the broader implications of modern hypertechnology for the profession as a whole (Cnaan & Parsloe, 1989). We think this is so for two reasons. First, various types of hypertechnology have been evolving quite rapidly, making it difficult for practitioners (Stretch & Kreuger, 1992) and educators (LaMendola, 1987) to keep up and second, there has not been a sufficiently broad conceptual framework from which to judge the modern hypertechnology assemblage in it's entirety (Pickering, 1995). It is time to take stock of our investments in social work and assess how well hypertechnology's promise has been kept. To help get this done we apply a model, suggested by Kitchin (1998), that we believe provides a broad conceptual overview for assessing social work's relation to this evolving international technological assemblage (Perry, 1998). Second, we show how Kitchin's model may be used to frame policy and practice questions (see for example, Schopler, Abell, & Galinsky, 1998; Seabury & Maple, 1993) for the human services. A Conceptual Framework for Understanding Hypertechnology in Social Work Kitchin (1998) maintains that there are six fundamental perspectives for viewing discussions of the effect of hypertechnology: Utopist-futurist, determinist, constructivist, political-economic, postmodernist, and feminist. Each perspective captures a slightly different aspect of how hypertechnology tends to be viewed in the literature and therefore what kinds of questions might be raised. In this article we have extended Kitchin's basic model, specifically, his sixth perspective, feminism, to include any set of hypertechnology users or potential users who are not currently empowered, and we renamed the category polyvocal perspective (Table 1). Utopist-Futurist Perspective According to Kitchin (1998), Utopist and futurist analysts of hypertechnology would seek to forecast how technological innovation would affect future conditions on a societal scale. Such forecasters would claim societies are moving en masse to some new and novel stage and that many vexing problems today will be subject to radically new scientific solutions in the future (Kitchin). In the social work literature, Kreuger (1997) and Stoesz (1997) forecasted an end of the social work profession after the collapse of public auspices resulting from the decline of the nation-state and pressures of globalization. They both included advances in technotherapies and hypertechnological prosthetic territories and subsequent decline in the grand narratives of the profession as powerful indications of the inevitable future course of the profession. To the futurists and Utopists, the hypertechnological assemblage (Phillips, 1990) is just one of a set of inevitable forces that bring on massive structural changes. Utopists and futurists see little hope of redirecting changes, so that we would be well served as a profession to learn to accept and adapt to inevitable massive structural change. Determinist Perspective The technological determinists perspective is perhaps the most common. Different types of local hypertechnology are seen as independent, active, and determining, and social work as a profession would be seen as more passive and reactive (Kitchin, 1998). Here, writers examine how micro-oriented social, cultural, political, and economic aspects of our lives both as professionals in practice (Conklin & Osterndorf, 1995) and in education (Patterson & Yaffe, 1994; Wodarski & Kelly, 1987) are determined individually at the local level by technology. …