The Digital Life-space as a Practice Setting

The ascendancy of cyberspace as an extension of life-space has significant implications for child and youth care practice and education. Within the timespan of our professional careers, practice has evolved from handwritten reports (typed by the secretary if you were part of a big agency) to web-based “case files” accessed by multiple agencies; from “land-lines” and pagers to cell phones, telehealth, online gaming, apps, and Google. The transformation of the digital life-space has been exponential such that since we wrote together about the phenomena (Martin & Stuart, 2011), the changes have magnified tenfold.