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New Zealand, similar to many other westernised nations, has a well-developed national culture of drinking to intoxication. Within this cultural context, young women are exhorted to engage with the night time economy, get drunk and have “fun” without relinquishing claims to “respectability”. More recently, the rise of Facebook and other social networking sites has coincided with shifts in postfeminism, neo-liberalism and the development of the night time economy. Social networking sites have become a mundane part of people’s everyday lives, whilst still reflecting structural constraints such as class, ethnicity and gender. This article reports on a qualitative study of young women’s drinking practices and uses of Facebook. Focus group discussions were conducted with eight friendship groups involving 36 participants aged 18–25 years. Transcripts of these discussions were subjected to thematic analysis. Three key themes were identified: “tragic girls” and “crack whores”; “drunken femininities”; and “Facebook, alcohol and drunken femininities”. The results indicated that young women experienced significant tensions in expressing their “drunken femininities” both in public and online, whilst also engaging in “airbrushing” of Facebook photos to minimize the appearance of intoxication for known and unknown audiences.

Discourse analysis of public submissions arising from an overt racial conflict in New Zealand in 1979 has yielded a number of patterns in the talk of Pakeha New Zealanders. An outline of two such patterns is presented and these are then drawn upon in the deconstruction of a piece of contemporary Pakeha discourse. This analysis is designed to shed some light on the significance of the patterns presented; their durability, their function, and their contribution to the apparent success of the sample discourse and their role in a broader Pakeha ideology of Maori/Pakeha relations in Aotearoa (New Zealand).

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Alcohol consumption and heavy drinking in young adults have been key concerns for public health. Alcohol marketing is an important factor in contributing to negative outcomes. The rapid growth in the use of new social networking technologies raises new issues regarding alcohol marketing, as well as potential impacts on alcohol cultures more generally. Young people, for example, routinely tell and re-tell drinking stories online, share images depicting drinking, and are exposed to often intensive and novel forms of alcohol marketing. In this paper, we critically review the research literature on (a) social networking technologies and alcohol marketing and (b) online alcohol content on social networks, and then consider implications for public health knowledge and research. We conclude that social networking systems are positive and pleasurable for young people, but are likely to contribute to pro-alcohol environments and encourage drinking. However, currently research is preliminary and descriptive, and we need innovative methods and detailed in-depth studies to gain greater understanding of young people's mediated drinking cultures and commercial alcohol promotion.