A CRITICAL-REFLECTIVE VIEWABOUT ICTS

THE “CASE” OF ITS INCORPORATION BY SOCIAL WORK

Abstract

This paper aims to analyze Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and their incorporation by Social Work, especially from the context of Covid-19, when the theme of technology appears in the particularity represented in the "mediation" of relationships social, determined by the need for social isolation. Supported by historical-dialectical materialism, through bibliographic research, it demonstrates that technology reveals man's active attitude towards nature. Based on the work's premise, it intends to reveal the process in which the changes in the productive forces dictate the course of human history. The use of technology, therefore, not being neutral in itself, results from the need to intensify the work processes that cause the exploitation of the working class. The study also demonstrates that the demand for fluidity and adaptability of work to flexibility is not a novelty of the present time. Far from it, it derives from the permanent contradiction of capitalism, caused by the purchase and sale of the workforce, to which ICTs are added. In view of this, it reflects the “chance” of the incorporation of technologies by Social Work, in the context of the global pandemic and structural crisis, indicating that the counterface of innovations that implies the intensification of the precariousness of work relationships must be prevented. It notes, through the ethical-political project, that work, by launching humanity into a historical process embodied by development beyond itself, is the basis of technology and that its use can be converted in favor of the interests of those who created it: The man.