Technology and counselling in Africa: Reflections from MSc counselling students at a selected university in Zimbabwe

Abstract

Since the introduction of counselling and internet in counselling in 1990s, technology use has become pervasive, with people conducting a good portion of their lives online or using technological gadgets. It is no wonder then that technology use has begun to be applied to the provision of counselling and psychological interventions. Technology may be defined broadly to include all computer hardware and software, telecommunication products and Webbased information (Epstein & Bequette, 2013). Such a broad definition encompasses most electronic gadgets, applications such as instant messaging platforms, and Web-based social networking platforms such as blogs, social networking sites and virtual worlds (Mullen et al., 2014). The terms e-counselling, virtual counselling, cyber counselling, online counselling and Internet counselling are used interchangeably to describe Internet-based counselling applications (Beidoglu et al., 2015). This article examines the use of technology in counselling, with a particular focus on distance counselling, as well as information sharing and communication including online support forums and professional networks. Distance counselling, or online counselling, is the term that refers to counselling that is delivered using computer-mediated communication (Deslonde & Becerra, 2018;Richards, 2013) as opposed to the traditional face-to-face