technology in human sevices

1. The advantages to human servcies being available online are that it makes it more accessible to those who may not have time to spend all day waiting at a social service office for assistance. It also helps because some of them offer pre-screening and allow you to see if you qualify for the service in a short time frame once again circumventing the long waits in person or on the phone associated with social service departments. Disadvantages are that most things online are done without assistance from someone who knows what they’re doing so if you’re confused you will have to either email and wait up to 72 hours for a response or call and wait for hours on hold for help. There’s also only so much that can get done and most social services require a human to look over what you have filled out online and make a decision so it hasn’t cut the wait out of the process overall.  

2. Technology has made it easier for people to access information, knowledge and resources that they need. It has also made it easier for people to share their ideas with others, which helps us all learn from one another and as a society. BUT. Technology can have a downside, particularly when it removes jobs, reduces local responsibility, ignores local relationships and produces worse outcomes. How many jobs do you think we have created over the past 10 years that have been switched to technology thus human workers?

3. I feel like there are more advantages than disadvantages to technology in human service delivery. One of the advantages is during covid, if a loved one was ill or in the hospital, in a nursing home, etc. their family members still had a way to contact them and see them. Video chats, text messages, phone calls. There’s also Life360 which is an app that you can keep track of family through and make sure they are okay at all times. One disadvantage though, is that with technology, comes hackers. Your personal information can be hacked and spread publicly if you aren’t super careful. Thankfully, most technology and applications make that super hard to do.