How do social media-related attachments and assemblages encourage or reduce drinking among young people?

Abstract

Research shows that young people's online practices have become a continuous, seamless and routine part of their physical and social worlds. Studies report contradictory findings on whether social media promotes intoxication-driven drinking cultures among young people or diminishes their alcohol consumption. By applying actor-network theory, our starting point is that the effects of social media depend on what kinds of concerns mediate its use. Social media alone cannot make young people drink more or less but influences their drinking in relation to specific attachments that we call here 'assemblages'. The data consist of individual interviews among girls (n = 32) and boys (n = 24) between 15 and 19 years old from Sweden, covering topics such as alcohol use, social media habits and leisure time activities. The paper maps the variety of assemblages that mediate young people's online practices and analyzes how young people's drinking-related social media assemblages increase, decrease or exclude their alcohol consumption. The analysis shows that social media-related attachments seem to reduce our interviewees' use of alcohol by providing competing activities, by transforming their drinking under the public eye, by reorganizing their party rituals to be less oriented towards drinking and by facilitating parents' monitoring of their drinking situations. ARTICLE HISTORY

Health, risk-taking and well-being: doing gender in relation to discourses and practices of heavy drinking and health among young people

“…Moreover, in our data girls are more concerned than boys about images in which they are represented in the online environment as intoxicated, a phenomenon studied more specifically elsewhere (Törrönen et al, 2020a). Also, this concern shows how female drinking behaviour faces more intensive social control and moral censure than that of young men.…”

Doing adulthood—doing alcohol: what happens when the ‘sober generation’ grows up?

“…This article is based on the third interview occasion, including 39 participants with an age range from 17 to 21 years old. Previous results have concentrated on the first and second interview occasions to understand this change when the participants were 15-19 years old (Törrönen et al 2019(Törrönen et al , 2020a(Törrönen et al , 2020b(Törrönen et al , 2020c. The results corroborate previous findings (e.g.…”

“…This substantial decrease in young people's drinking has puzzled researchers, politicians, and the public, and little is still known about the mechanisms behind it (Raninen and Livingston 2018). Recent studies have presented multiple explanations, and our study is part of a longitudinal project investigating this change in drinking culture (see Törrönen et al 2019Törrönen et al , 2020aTörrönen et al , 2020bTörrönen et al , 2020c. In this project, young people in Sweden have been interviewed on three occasions.…”

“…De Looze et al 2015; ESPAD Group 2016), which suggest that young people are drinking less, and present several theories to explain this; e.g. changes in gender identity (Törrönen et al 2019) and parental style (Øia and Vestel 2014) as well as increased social media use (Norström and Svensson 2014;Törrönen et al 2020a). It seems that drinking alcohol is not as important in young people's self-representations today as it used to be (cf.…”

Declining drinking among adolescents: Are we seeing a denormalisation of drinking and a normalisation of non‐drinking?

“…Earlier research showed how social media encouraged displays of drinking [100] and exposed adolescents to alcohol advertising [101]. More recent research suggests that social media also brings with it a range of complexities around self‐presentation, future employment, censorship and engagement with risk that discourages drinking and displays of drunkenness [86,102]. Greater alcohol use among heavy social media users suggests social media platforms continue to reinforce pro‐alcohol norms and encourage socialising with alcohol [103].…”