Children and Families in the Digital Age offers a fresh, nuanced, and empirically-based perspective on how families are using digital media to enhance learning, routines, and relationships. This powerful edited collection contributes to a growing body of work suggesting the importance of understanding how the consequences of digital media use are shaped by family culture, values, practices, and the larger social and economic contexts of families’ lives. Chapters offer case studies, real-life examples, and analyses of large-scale national survey data, and provide insights into previously unexplored topics such as the role of siblings in shaping the home media ecology.

This handbook provides an authoritative and cutting-edge overview of current research and trends related to the emerging field of digital technology and social work. This book is divided into six sections: Reframing Social Work in a Digital Society Shaping a Science of Social Work in the Digital Society Digital Social Work in Practice The Ethics of Digital Social Work Digital Social Work and the Digitalization of Welfare Institutions: Opportunities, Challenges and Country Cases Digital Social Work: Future Challenges, Directions and Transformations This book, comprised of 40 specially commissioned chapters, explores the main intersections between social work theory and practice in an increasingly digitized world. Bringing a critical focus to how social work as a profession is adapting exponentially to embrace the benefits of technology, it gives specific consideration to the digitalization of the social work profession, including the ways in which social workers are using different forms of technology to provide effective services and innovative practice responses. With chapters on big data, digital archiving, e-citizenship and inclusion, gerontechnology, children and technology, and data ethics, this book will be of interest to all social work scholars, students and professionals as well as those working in science and technology studies more broadly.

Social work practice with children, young people and families is complex, highly skilled - and fascinating. Writing about social work increasingly acknowledges the complexities and uncertainties of practice but rarely features the voice of the social worker themselves. This book takes a different approach, that of Critical Best Practice: a constructive, realistic and strengths-based approach that takes as its starting point the telling and analysing of in depth stories about 'live' practice. The reader is encouraged to join the social work practitioner or manager as they engage with the everyday dilemmas and uncertainties of 21st century practice. Ten narratives, based round the themes of relationships, risk, and negotiation & problem solving provide varied opportunities for critical reflection and learning about social work in different contexts. Insights are offered into social work with children, from young babies to adolescents, and families with differing needs in different parts of the UK: England, Scotland and Wales.

How we think: digital media and contemporary technogenesis -- First interlude: practices and processes in digital media -- The digital humanities: engaging the issues -- How we read: close, hyper, machine -- Second interlude: the complexities of contemporary technogenesis -- Tech-toc: complex temporalities and contemporary technogenesis -- Technogenesis in action: telegraph code books and the place of the human -- Third interlude: narrative and database: digital media as forms -- Narrative and database: spatial history and the limits of symbiosis -- Transcendent data and transmedia narrative: Steven Hall's The raw shark texts -- Mapping time, charting data: the spatial aesthetic of Mark Z. Danielewski's Only revolutions.

This book emphasizes family-centered, social network, and school-based interventions in the preparation of social workers for direct and indirect practice with clients from vulnerable populations, especially the poor, people of color, and recent immigrant groups. With an eye to recent changes in social work practice and service delivery, including the impact of welfare reform and managed care on vulnerable families and children, Social Work Practice with Families and Children helps social work students and practitioners understand the increasingly complex needs of their clients. Three valuable appendixes include information about tools and instruments to support practice, child welfare resource centers, and electronic resources pertaining to the field.

This thoroughly revised and updated third edition provides a comprehensive introduction to the various approaches to the field, explaining why media messages matter, how media businesses prosper and why media is integral to defining contemporary life. The text is divided into three parts – Media texts and meanings; Producing media; and Media and social contexts – exploring the ways in which various media forms make meaning; are produced and regulated; and how society, culture and history are defined by such forms. Encouraging students to actively engage in media research and analysis, each chapter seeks to guide readers through key questions and ideas in order to empower them to develop their own scholarship, expertise and investigations of the media worlds in which we live. Fully updated to reflect the contemporary media environment, the third edition includes new case studies covering topics such as Brexit, podcasts, Love Island, Captain Marvel, Black Lives Matter, Netflix, data politics, the Kardashians, President Trump, ‘fake news’, the post-Covid world and perspectives on global media forms. This is an essential introduction for undergraduate and postgraduate students of media studies, cultural studies, communication studies, film studies, the sociology of the media and popular culture.

This book provides a long-overdue account of online technology and its impact on the work and lifestyles of professional employees. It moves between the offices and homes of workers in the knew "knowledge" economy to provide intimate insight into the personal, family, and wider social tensions emerging in today’s rapidly changing work environment. Drawing on her extensive research, Gregg shows that new media technologies encourage and exacerbate an older tendency among salaried professionals to put work at the heart of daily concerns, often at the expense of other sources of intimacy and fulfillment. New media technologies from mobile phones to laptops and tablet computers, have been marketed as devices that give us the freedom to work where we want, when we want, but little attention has been paid to the consequences of this shift, which has seen work move out of the office and into cafés, trains, living rooms, dining rooms, and bedrooms. This professional "presence bleed" leads to work concerns impinging on the personal lives of employees in new and unforseen ways. This groundbreaking book explores how aspiring and established professionals each try to cope with the unprecedented intimacy of technologically-mediated work, and how its seductions seem poised to triumph over the few remaining relationships that may stand in its way.