Digital Social Work in ordinary and Extraordinary times. The Italian Experience

All over the world, and in Italy as well, the pandemic crisis has accelerated a digitization process, in almost all workplaces, as well as in our personal life. The emerging phenomena that, until a few years ago, scholars of various disciplines theorized by coining new terms such as “information society” (Castells 1997), “net economy” (Shapiro and Varian 1999), “digital revolution” (Coyle 2008) have now assumed such relevance that they have become an integral part of contemporary societies. The generalized lockdown offered further possibilities of experimenting with digital technologies, which seem to work to integrate, if not replace, functions traditionally performed in presence. In the digital era, also social work, traditionally based on face-to-face social relationships, has been pushed to integrate communication technologies, that are offering new possibilities, as well as challenges for social work practice (Dominelli 2005; Csiernik et al. 2006; Hill and Ferguson 2014; Mishna et al. 2014; López Peláez et al. 2018; Byrne and Kirwan 2019; Fontana 2019). As in other countries, in Italy the introduction of numerous platforms, whose use exploded during the quarantine, provided opportunities previously underestimated if not ignored, to meet and interact with people in various digital contexts. In this chapter, we explore how Italian social work has adapted to these unprecedented changes, considering its still uncommon and much unexplored use of digital resources in the pre-pandemic stage.