Dr Barratt is an NHMRC Postdoctoral Fellow conducting research into the social and public health implications of internet technologies for people who use illicit and emerging psychoactive drugs.

In the context of high levels of drug access, supply and diversity occurring within a community regulated environment online, the impacts of cryptomarkets upon drug use trajectories are complex, often posing new challenges for self-control, yet not always leading to harmful outcomes. A major policy challenge is how to provide support for harm reduction in these highly volatile settings.

This paper explores Web 2.0 as the marker of a discourse about the nature and purpose of the internet in the recent past. It focuses on how Web 2.0 introduced to our thinking about the internet a discourse of versions. Such a discourse enables the telling of a ‘history’ of the internet which involves a complex interweaving of past, present and future, as represented by the additional versions which the introduction of Web 2.0 enabled. The paper concludes that the discourse of versions embodied in Web 2.0 obscures as much as it reveals, and suggests a new project based on investigations of the everyday memories of the internet by which individual users create their own histories of online technology.

In 2007, a young woman, Annabel Catt, died after consuming a capsule sold as 'ecstasy' that contained para-methoxyamphetamine (PMA). In this paper, we describe how this death was depicted in online drug-user communities and illustrate how the meanings of drug use are negotiated in online settings. News articles, public online discussions, and online fieldwork formed the data. This paper demonstrates how dominant drug discourses may be resisted by drug users, drawing on theories of health resistance and Kane Race's concept of counterpublic health. Online environments may offer ways of engaging people who use drugs that acknowledge both pleasure and safety.

Using the example of an undergraduate unit of study that is taught both on-campus and externally, but uses Internet-based learning in both cases, we explore how social media might be used effectively in higher education. We place into question the assumption that such technologies necessarily engage students in constructivist learning; we argue that the affordances of social media must be complemented by social affordances, designed into the learning experience, which thereby generate the necessary connection between students' motivations to study and their motivations to exploit social media. We demonstrate, via the example given, how assessment structures and strategies are the most effective focus when attempting to create the pedagogical affordances that might lead to collaborative learning.