As I reflect on my own childhood and youth, services and tools in the digital world have changed dramatically. I was born in the 1980s and as a child you would never have imagined that you could take photos on your phone or see a doctor remotely, for example. Change has been rapid and nowadays digitization is strongly visible in everyone’s everyday life as digitization enables a lot and creates opportunities for the development of new versatile services.
Great example for this are the services of social and health sector. I have worked in youth services for the last seven years in outreach youth work and the use of digitalization has become one of the ways of working in youth work in general in recent years. Multiple digital platforms are offered to young people where they can meet youth service professionals in a low-threshold and confidential discussion. For example various chat platforms and the Discord instant messaging service are widely used by youth workers. Digital platforms also allow young people to make new friends and when necessary to receive peer support.
Various video games have been developed for the youth work field and for social and health professionals in general. These can be used for example by youth service workers in individual counselling sessions with young people to support discussions. For example, Kainuu University of Applied Sciences has developed the “Game of My Life”, which I have used in my work with young people. The game can be downloaded for everyone’s use from Google Play and the App Store. (Diakonia University of Applied Sciences 2020).
It is important that professionals are part of the world of young people and are familiar with the use of social media and games. As digital services evolve it is also important to consider the digital skills of each individual and to allow for a face-to-face meeting with a professional. After the COVID19 pandemic some young people want to meet professionals face to face after long periods of isolation. Digital services are here to stay and, in the future, when developing services, it is good to involve the customers themselves in developing digital services, for example through workshops. In addition to using various applications, I use the internet in my work on a daily basis especially for various information searches and customer records. In addition to my phone I work on the computer almost daily.
Data protection
As digital services evolve it is important to consider the different risk factors. In customer service work data protection is a primary focus. Data protection in digital services defines the use of social media applications in different ways in early help services. For example outreach youth workers use WhatsApp Messenger and Instagram to communicate with their clients. On the other hand the use of WhatsApp is not considered viable option in social work due to security concerns. In outreach work young people’s involvement is voluntary which creates an opportunity for low-threshold conversations through various social media tools.
It is noteworthy that using social media to communicate with clients always requires care and consideration on what issues can be discussed with the young person using the apps. It is also important for professionals working with young people to inform young people about data protection issues on social media. It is great that more attention is being paid to data protection these days. In my line of work the importance of data protection and how to take it into account, for example when making customer records, is discussed almost weekly basis. In the future I could broaden my professionalism by taking a comprehensive look at the data protection reform and reflect on how it will affect my work. I do not see any negative effects of the data protection reform. I think it would be good for every person to be familiar with data protection. For example in a way that each of us know where our personal data might appear.
Self evaluation
The assignment made it interesting to read other students’ thoughts on digitization and data protection, because regardless of the job, it is part of everyone’s everyday life in some way. The assignment helped me to learn more about the digital world, including my own work, by thinking about what digital tools I use on a daily basis. This is something you don’t really think about in your own familiar work. It also made me think about which applications we could use more actively in our work.
Source: Diakonia University of Applied Sciences 2020. Uusi hyötypeli tukee nuorten elämänhallintaa. Online publication. https://www.diak.fi/2020/04/03/uusi-hyotypeli-tukee-nuorten-elamanhallintaa/. Viitattu 26.5.2023.
Blogs i commented:
https://blogi.savonia.fi/tepuntarinoita/digi-society/