A Picture Tells a Thousand Stories: Young Women, Mobile Technology, and Drinking Narratives

Transgressive drinking practices and the subversion of proscriptive alcohol policy messages

“…Data sets were gathered between 2004 and 2007 and remain salient as expressions of drinking practices that, while not representative of all harmful drinking, nonetheless remain current practices amongst certain groups (Brown & Gregg, 2012: Brown, 2013: Hutton & Wright, 2015: Haydock, 2014). An initial phase explored the alcohol marketing landscape with an analysis of the ways in which drink and drinkers were represented in 216 print, broadcast and outdoor advertisements for different types of drinks.…”

“…As individual behaviour, transgression can be seen not only as a matter of deviance, but as a "deeply reflexive act of denial and affirmation" (Jenks, 2003, p.3) in the sense that transgressing the norm also cements its social significance. For example, government sponsored antidrinking advertising campaigns in the UK and Australia have targeted women by portraying excessive drinking as un-feminine, yet apparently without any deterrent effect (Brown, 2013). The ideological dilemma of being feminine and also enjoying heavy drinking is discursively negotiated within existing ideological frames of femininity.…”

“…As a result of trying to mediate between the market needs of suppliers, many of whom are directly involved in alcohol policy formulation (Moodie et al, 2013), and public health priorities, certain drinking practices that are constituted as harmful or dangerous are effectively criminalised by policy (Moore & Measham, 2012) and the individuals who indulge in them are constituted as reckless or irresponsible . The distinction between acceptable and unacceptable drinking practices is not necessarily clear because of the variability in definitions of excessive 'binge' drinking (Herring, Berridge, & Thom, 2008) while drinking practices themselves are inflected by discourses of class and gender (Brown, 2013). As a result, there is a potentially mixed message or double standard in proscriptive policy messages (Hobbs, Winlow, Hadfield, & Lester, 2005) that characterise transgressors of desired norms in terms of a moral deficit ) but ignore the ways in which extreme drinking practices are constituted as fun and enjoyable by participants (Brown & Gregg, 2012;Griffin, Bengry-Howell, Hackley, Mistral, & Szmigin, 2009a;Moore & Measham, 2012).…”

“I Want to See Those Memories”: Social Affordances of Mobile Phone Cameras and Social Network Sites in Collegiate Drinking

“…In these circumstances, the images produced with mobile phone cameras and posted on social media sites can produce unintended social ripple effects that may result in job loss, expulsion from college, or legal difficulties. While some of the potentially problematic disciplinary functions and effects of these discursive practices have been pointed out (Brown, 2013), this remains a predominant frame for describing and understanding college party photography in both the scholarly literature and popular media.…”

Can positive faith-based encounters influence Australian young people’s drinking behaviours?

“…The pre-requisite health behaviours that dominate the literature, as part of this adolescent journey, include unsafe sex, excessive drinking of alcohol and the taking of illicit drugs -behaviours sometimes influenced by recent technological communication developments, such as the significant influence of social media (Brown, 2013;Fournier et al, 2013;Gommans et al, 2015;Miller et al, 2014).…”