Youth Drinking Cultures in a Digital World

Alcohol, Social Media and Cultures of Intoxication

Antonia Lyons, Tim McCreanor, Ian Goodwin, Helen Moewaka Barnes, Antonia Lyons, Tim McCreanor, Ian Goodwin, Helen Moewaka Barnes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138959040
• eBook ISBN: 9781317338321
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

Social media has helped boost the culture of intoxication, a central aspect of young people's social lives in many Western countries. Initial research suggests that these technologies enable highly-nuanced, targeted marketing and innovations – creating new virtual spaces that alter the dynamics and consequences of drinking cultures in significant ways.

Youth Drinking Cultures in a Digital World focuses on how pervasive social networking technologies contribute to drinking cultures. It brings together international contributions from leading researchers in this emerging field to explore how new technologies are reconfiguring the key themes, traditional interests, practices and concerns of alcohol-related research with young people. It is particularly concerned with three important areas, namely:

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• identities, social relations and power

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• alcohol marketing and commercialisation

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• public health and regulating alcohol promotion.

This innovative book includes original research and commentary and is a must-read for academics and researchers in the areas of public health, psychology, sociology, media studies, youth studies and alcohol studies.

Part I
Identities, social relations and power

1 Neoliberalism, alcohol and identity

A symptomatic reading of young people’s drinking cultures in a digital world

Ian Goodwin and Christine Griffin

A broad range of research has established the importance of youth drinking as an essentially social act with important implications for young people’s identities. There is long-standing evidence that peer groups form an important part of young people’s social lives generally (Kehily, 2007), and peer networks and friendship groups are central to youth drinking as a specific form of leisure practice which helps mark out identity and status, as well as a shared sense of communality (Douglas, 1987); Lyons and Willott, 2008); MacLean, 2016); Sheehan and Ridge, 2001)). Such socially orientated practices are often enhanced by the embodied pleasures young people experience while being drunk (Griffin et al., 2009)a; Szmigin et al., 2011). Moreover, ‘after the fact’, stories about drinking and drunken behaviour are often told and re-told amongst peer networks, playing a crucial additional role in the development and maintenance of friendships (Griffin et al., 2009)b; Sheehan and Ridge, 2001) and ongoing forms of identity work (Lyons and Willott, 2008); McCreanor et al., 2005). As the other chapters in part one of this volume will go on to outline in detail, these processes are always overlaid with power relations which produce important differentiations in experience across genders, socio-economic groups, ethnicities and sexualities. Conceptions of identity, identity work and differentiated power relations that work through categories of identity are all central to understanding the complexity of young people’s socially orientated drinking practices.

Over the past few decades the marketing campaigns launched by alcohol corporations have become increasingly aimed at aligning their branded messages with the meanings young people themselves form in their cultural practices and socialising. Young people have become increasingly familiar and comfortable with alcohol brands as a result, and take up and use brands in identity work across both personal and social settings (McCreanor et al., 2005); McCreanor et al., 2008). The concept of identity is also increasingly important to the way that alcohol, and in particular ‘problematic’ and ‘risky’ drinking by young people, is regulated and controlled. Alcohol consumption within the night-time economy, ‘as well as being something experienced by participants’, increasingly forms a key site of ‘spectacle with gendered and classed dynamics’, whereby certain forms of drinking and specific drinkers become identified by the state and subjected to a concerted regulatory gaze with direct policy implications (Haydock, 2015)a: 1). Young people, and in particular young women, are often ‘othered’ and pathologised through such processes (Brown and Gregg, 2012). Equally, health policy interventions seeking to minimise alcohol-related harms experienced by young people are increasingly taking account of the importance of drinking for young people’s sense of identity, and indeed it is argued that they must recognise the importance of peer-orientated socialising and associated processes of identity formation if they are to be effective (see Niland et al., 2013).

In sum, identity is well established in the literature as a key nexus, or lens, through which to analyse youth drinking cultures, both at the micro level of youth cultural practices and more broadly in terms of economics, marketing, regulation and policy. The growing centrality of digital media technologies to youth drinking practices has acted to enhance this broad relevance of identity as an analytical category. Many of the relevant online developments have been analysed in detail elsewhere in this volume, but the major issues related to identity are worth briefly recapping here. Social media have been appropriated by young people as a key site of online self-display where the pleasures, identity work, and socialising associated with their drinking cultures become extended and developed (Goodwin et al., 2016); Hebden et al., 2015); Niland et al., 2014). Analyses of self-displays and friendship in online drinking cultures have also found young people’s online practices to be bound up in structural constraints and power relations around class, gender and ethnicity in a fashion that mirrors earlier research of offline drinking cultures (Goodwin et al., 2016); Hutton et al., 2016). Alcohol corporations have been quick to follow young people to social media, utilising sites like Facebook as a key space to engage with young people in order to enhance their sales and aid their marketing campaigns. Young people’s everyday online activities now often seamlessly mesh with commercially driven alcohol promotion, blurring stark distinctions between user-generated and commercial content such that branded alcohol promotion is often a taken for granted, integral part of identity work and social life online (Carah et al., 2014); Nicholls, 2012). In opposition to these developments, social media are increasingly being considered as potentially important settings for engaging young people in forms of health promotion (Loss et al., 2014). Supplementing these shifts, new forms of more user-driven health campaign ‘movements’, like Hello Sunday Morning, ‘ask participants to stop drinking for a period of time, to set a personal goal, and to record their reflections and progress on blogs and social networks’ (Carah et al., 2015): 214). Meanwhile, a range of smartphone ‘apps’, such as ‘Let’s Get Wasted’, intensify and extend the importance of alcohol consumption to young people’s identities and social lives, both online and offline (Weaver et al., 2013).

Against this critical context, this chapter poses a key question: to what extent is the concept of neoliberalism useful for interrogating these broad inter-relationships between identity, youth drinking practices and digital media? We argue that setting alcohol-related identity issues in youth drinking cultures against the broader critical context suggested by the literature on neoliberalism is potentially highly useful. This is not least because neoliberalism as an analytical category highlights a series of productive interconnections between the contemporary (social, economic, political, policy) issues we have outlined here, equally helping to explain their extension in novel online developments. In this sense, we argue that neoliberalism provides the broader critical frame through which drinking cultures can be read ‘symptomatically’ as part of a ‘conjunctural analysis’ (Hall and Jefferson, 2006). A ‘symptomatic’ reading of drinking cultures entails treating them as reflective of wider social and political changes, rather than solely as reflections of individual motivations or attitudes. A ‘conjunctural analysis’ entails asking ‘why now?’, analysing social phenomena in relation to the key ‘political, economic and socio-cultural changes of their respective times’ (Hall and Jefferson, 2006): xiv). It in this respect that ‘neoliberalism’ becomes conceptually useful, because it remains our best means for naming, understanding, and critically interrogating the key political, economic and socio-cultural changes that mark out our contemporary societal ‘conjuncture’, as the current context in which drinking cultures play out in all their complexities. However, using the concept of neoliberalism in this way is not without its pitfalls. As an analytical term, it has been subject to sustained critique, frequently for the very reasons we are suggesting it is potentially advantageous: too often it is illdefined and yet very broadly applied in analyses that attempt to explain ‘everything’. In what follows then, we first outline the major debates over neoliberalism and define what we understand it to mean. Then we seek to show how our definitions of the term can usefully open up avenues of analysis. Ultimately we suggest ‘neoliberalism’ and ‘neoliberal identities’ become crucial analytical categories when applied appropriately as part of a symptomatic reading of drinking cultures. That is, these concepts remain extremely helpful for understanding youth drinking practices and their complex, ambivalent relationships to current power relations, identity categories, identity work and digital media.

Neoliberalism, critique and neoliberal identity

Neoliberalism has become one of the most widely invoked critical concepts across a variety of academic disciplines. However, it is often used in illdefined ways, ‘as a sloppy synonym for capitalism itself’ (Ferguson, 2010): 171), or is applied in relation to a multitude of competing definitions that are not always reconciled (Bell and Green, 2016); Ferguson, 2010). The term, which has an often unacknowledged and complex history (see Flew, 2012); Phelan, 2014), has therefore attracted significant critique (Barnett, 2005); Flew, 2009); Grossberg, 2010). There is not the space to canvass this history, or the detail of these critiques, here. However, drawing from Phelan’s (2014: 26–33) summation of these debates, we would highlight specific aspects of neoliberalism’s critique that are particularly pertinent for how we have, in response, structured our argument and analytical approach in this chapter. Neoliberalism can be problematically applied as a monolithic catch-all category that, in analyses which note the elements of a social context that appear neoliberal, go on to attempt to explain ‘everything’ in neoliberal terms. This tends to ride roughshod over the complexities of differentiated social contexts, while leading to a cookie-cutter approach to analysis which constantly subsumes the particular under the universal. That is, it leads to a tendency to suggest that naming something ‘neoliberal’ provides a sufficient explanation of all aspects of its nature. At worst, this can eventually lead to empirical phenomena identified as neoliberal being ‘cursorily disparaged rather than deemed worthy of additional analysis’ (Phelan, 2014): 32). This is a particular issue for our focus on youth cultures and drinking, where power-laden processes of othering, pathologising and marginalising youth practices are already in play. We want to argue that youth drinking cultures are not only contextually differentiated, complex and significant sites worthy of ongoing study, but are also deeply ambivalent, being bound up in processes where we see neoliberal forms of power in play but also being places where resistances, evasions and contestations of neoliberal logics are simultaneously enacted.

Critiques of neoliberalism equally suggest it is only useful as an analytical concept when it is applied with a critical self-reflexivity that starts by seeking to establish how neoliberalism plays out in specific contexts, rather than configuring it as a ‘fully present structure or agent with the totalizing power to cause, make, determine and act on a variety of social objects and practices’ (Phelan, 2014): 32). For us, part of this self-reflexivity involves the recognition that drawing on neoliberalism as our key conceptual category does not exclude other concepts being brought to bear in analysis. We argue our focus on using neoliberalism in a symptomatic reading of drinking cultures can accommodate alternative conceptual understandings. Indeed, concepts such as ‘the carnivalesque’ (Haydock, 2015a) and ‘healthism’ (Petersen and Lupton, 1996) have been usefully combined with analyses of neoliberal social formations, and we recognise their ongoing relevance in terms of reading youth drinking cultures symptomatically. Where applicable, we will briefly highlight interconnections with these terms in our analysis. Finally, critiques of neoliberalism suggest explicitly outlining how one intends to define and apply it in specific forms of analysis matters. From the range of applications available, we would highlight two definitions we deem particularly useful to our symptomatic/conjunctural approach.

The first relates to neoliberalism as it is most commonly under-stood, that is, as an economic ideology, tied to state policy changes, that heralds a process of capitalist restructuring and reform which has occurred globally since the 1970s. Keynesian economics, with its emphasis on state planning and intervention in the economy, and the associated rise of the welfare state, became identified as key impediments to progress in this process (Phelan, 2014). In contrast, neoliberal economics calls for a different set of rationalities to drive the actions of the state. That is, neoliberal reform marks out a series of key conjunctural changes that suggest:

[T]hat human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free market, and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices.

(Harvey, 2005): 2)

Thatcherism in the UK and Reaganism in the USA are often identified as paradigmatic, practical examples of the formation of new neoliberal states. However, a broad range of social democracies including Canada, New Zealand, Australia and Sweden have implemented similar market-centric reforms (Bell and Green, 2016). While the changes enacted since the 1970s have often been drastic in terms of factors such as the extensive roll back of the welfare state, the growing power of global corporations and the subsequent valorising of privatisation and competition, both the political and the corporate elites in Western democracies often refuse to label their actions as neoliberal or even as driven in ideological terms (Phelan, 2014). Rather, neoliberalism is more often positioned in terms of a neutral pragmatism, as simply ‘what works’ in a globalised economy (Phelan, 2014). Neoliberalism therefore assumes a certain form of invisibility, so that Monbiot (2016) argues it remains ill understood by the general public and is seldom recognised as an ideology or as a project consciously enacted. This matters to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction to youth drinking cultures in a digital world
• Part I Identities, social relations and power
• Part II Alcohol marketing and commercialisation
• Part III Public health and regulating alcohol promotion
• Index