Digital administrative mediation: communication infrastructures and institutional interaction in child welfare systems

Digital technologies increasingly shape interaction within child welfare systems, but they do not constitute a single integrated infrastructure. Family-facing communication tools, worker-facing documentation systems, and interorganizational technologies perform distinct functions within a broader communication ecology through which interaction is transmitted, recorded, circulated, and interpreted. This conceptual article introduces digital administrative mediation to describe the contingent processes through which communication infrastructures shape the timing, format, visibility, documentation, and institutional interpretation of interactions between families and child welfare agencies. Drawing together scholarship on digital social work, infrastructure, institutional trust, administrative burden, surveillance, relationship-based practice, and digital inequality, the article argues that digitalization reorganizes longstanding documentary and interpretive practices by altering the speed, persistence, granularity, circulation, retrievability, and apparent precision of administrative traces. These infrastructures may support transparency, accessibility, continuity, procedural support, and reciprocal accountability while also contributing to digital distance through relational displacement, asymmetrical visibility, proceduralization, administrative burden, and unequal participation. Their effects depend on technological design, organizational conditions, professional discretion, relationship-based practice, digital vulnerability, and opportunities for children and families to clarify or contest institutional representations. The article concludes by identifying implications for rights-based design, participatory governance, accessibility, ethical documentation, and institutional accountability.