Listening across distance: Rethinking empathy and presence in digital social work

The COVID-19 pandemic compelled social workers to sustain helping relationships without physical co-presence, and mediated listening has persisted beyond the crisis. This conceptual article asks how empathic recognition is accomplished when practitioner and service user do not share a room. Drawing on relationship-based social work, recognition theory, and postphenomenological accounts of technological mediation, it advances the concept of digitally mediated empathic presence: the accomplishment of emotional recognition and relational attunement through an intervening technical medium. The concept is specified through four dimensions (temporal availability, dialogic continuity, calibrated distance, and signaled receipt) and distinguished from social presence and therapeutic presence. The argument is developed through four Indian cases, namely the national tele-mental health program, gendered conditions of device access, the reporting of domestic violence during the lockdowns, and the access shifts recorded in the sixth National Family Health Survey. Mediated distance can enable disclosure that proximate settings constrain, while foreclosing it for speakers who do not control the device or the room. Mediation therefore neither erodes nor uniformly extends empathic practice; it redistributes the conditions under which voice becomes possible.