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“ALWAYS ON” — DEALING WITH A CONSTANT AVAILABILITY
setting. By this supervision loses partly its function as a shelter and
space for trial action or rehearsal. So it is important to regulate CMC
around supervision settings.
c. Clients ask for computer mediated methods (e.g. telecoaching, on¬
line counselling or apps). That influences not only the medium of
counselling but also its framework: Counselling might function in
brief episodes or as instant counselling and might lose its distance
and function as retrospective.
d. Counselling becomes even more a space for social learning in an
“encounter group”: As computer mediated social learning is a curtailed
learning environment it becomes growingly important to offer space
for social learning beside the so called social web.
And beside that supervisors and coaches are also affected by blurring of
boundaries and permanent availability as users and freelancers themselves.
QUESTIONS OF FURTHER RESEARCH
Further research and discussion should take place as smart devices wouldn’t
vanish as fast as they spread. On the contrary, worldwide network coverage
is growing, and by every new series devices offer a greater convergence of
functions. Therefore three aspects should be named, where further work is
necessary.
a) Which impacts will deliver ubiquitous computing together with digi¬
talization and artificial intelligence to the profession as a supervisor
or coach? The development of speech recognition software is fast, and
it’s already very tricky to detect voice response of computers (there are
apps available for this purpose!) in telecommunication. Will there be
automated coaching sessions answered by digital voice response? Back
in 1966 Weizenbaum developed a software (“ELIZA”) simulating a
psychotherapist using the technique of non-directive counselling by Carl
Rogers. He was very surprised to learn how eager psychotherapists were to
automate psychotherapy by this way. Even if this is still impossible, there
may be use cases for simple applications like instant coachings adapting
highly structured tools.
b) If we accept with Rosa”? that the world is accelerating and that ubiquitous
computing is a big accelerator quickly the question appears how counselling
” Hartmut Rosa, Weltbeziehungen im Zeitalter der Beschleunigung: Umrisse einer neuen
Gesellschaftskritik, Frankfurt a. M., Suhrkamp, 2012.
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