Digital Streetwork: Social Work in Digital Space

Chat forums, social media, online communities – the Internet offers many addresses and reference points that can be described as “digital spaces”. There you can meet like-minded people, get information, pursue your interests – or even identify and contact specific groups of people in a very targeted way. This is what social work does. Led by pioneers of “digital street work,” it has discovered the Internet as a means of reaching hard-to-reach or vulnerable target groups. And although small, specialized networks in particular value and support social workers as a complement and relief for (often volunteer) content moderators, outreach digital communication is not yet widely established in social work. Specific skills that “digital” social workers need to be credible and trustworthy in online communities are hardly part of their training. Political support and public demand are slow to emerge. However, the interests and business practices of large, commercial platforms are not necessarily compatible with the conditions for serious social work based on professional standards.

Christina Dinar is a social worker and cultural studies graduate. In her practical work and as a researcher and lecturer at the Catholic University of Applied Social Sciences in Berlin, she has established a focus on communities in digital spaces in social work. The expert and pioneer of “digital streetwork” explains in this episode of Digitalgespräch what professional online social work does and under what conditions it succeeds, how far the professionalization of digital social work online is today, and what skills digital streetworkers need. She describes different concepts and approaches of this form of social work and the position of digital streetwork in relation to content moderators and platform operators. With hosts Marlene Görger and Petra Gehring, Dinar discusses who bears responsibility for socially acceptable, safe digital spaces, the importance of global platforms as infrastructure for social work today – and whether the funding logic for social projects that originated in the analog era applies to the digital world.

Further informationen:

Link to Christina Dinar’s profile on the website of Katholische Hochschule für Sozialwesen Berlin: https://www.khsb-berlin.de/de/profile-personal/136265

Link to information on the “Digital Streetwork” approach of the Amadeu Antonio Foundation: https://www.amadeu-antonio-stiftung.de/good-gaming-well-played-democracy/digital-streetwork/