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Drugs: Education, Prevention and Policy Volume 20, 2013 - Issue 2
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YouTube, ‘drug videos’ and drugs education

Paul ManningSchool of Media and Film, King Alfred Campus, University of Winchester, West Hill, Winchester, UKCorrespondence[email protected]
Pages 120-130 | Received 27 Mar 2012, Accepted 14 Jun 2012, Published online: 20 Jul 2012
 
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Abstract

Aims: This article reports on findings to emerge from a project examining YouTube ‘drug videos’ in the light of an emerging literature on the relationship between YouTube and health education. The aim of this article is to describe the variety of discourses circulated by the ‘drug videos’ available on YouTube and to consider the implications of these for mediated drugs education.

Method: The method used is a content analysis of a sample of 750 ‘drug videos’ in which both video text and loader comments are used to code ‘drug discourses’.

Findings: The findings point to the circulation of a variety of ‘drug videos’ of which official drugs education materials represent only a small proportion. The ‘drug videos’ created by YouTube users circulate a variety of ‘drug discourses’ including the ‘celebratory’ or hedonistic but also ‘cautionary’ videos intended to ‘warn’ or ‘discipline’ but others offer an ‘amateur’ or ‘vernacular drugs education’ while still others develop ‘consumer discourses’ which evaluate substances and technologies of intoxication as commodities.

Conclusions: The findings suggest that in the symbolic environment of YouTube drugs education strategies based upon ‘old media’ assumptions become highly problematic. This is firstly, because official drugs education material now has to compete with a variety of alternative discourses circulated in the ‘drug videos’ created by YouTube users. Secondly, some of these videos offer an alternative ‘vernacular drugs education’, or offer alternative understandings of drug use. But thirdly, in the era of Web 2.0 technologies such as YouTube, lines of communication are no longer characterized by simple linearity but multiple directionality, which mean that official drugs agencies are now even less assured of communicative control than in the past.

Notes

1. The manual cleaning strategy involved physically checking the first 100 videos returned in every category, noting the numbers that were not actually relevant to the search (e.g. GHB videos about ‘get home bags’ not the drug) and using this figure to estimate the total of non-relevant videos for the search category as whole.

2. The software can be downloaded for free from http://lexiurl.wlv.ac.uk/, accessed 12th March 2012.

3. All coding were undertaken by the author but two students were trained to use the coding schedule and apply it to 60 videos producing an acceptable level of agreement (pi = 0.798).The coding schedule and details of the results produced by the searches using the list of original search terms are available on the author's page at academia.edu and the University of Winchester School of Media and Film pages.

4. Burgess and Green (Citation2009, p. 25) use the phrase ‘vernacular creativity’ to refer to the ‘wide range of everyday creative practices’ outside ‘the cultural value systems of either high culture or commercial creative practice’. In this article, ‘vernacular drugs education’ refers to everyday knowledge and cultural practices associated with drug use circulated by ordinary people, as opposed to professional drugs workers, criminal justice officers or medical staff.

5. ‘Loaders’ are those loading videos to YouTube. Loaders usually also post a comment offering a particular interpretation of the video. Loader comments are distinguished from subsequent ‘comment strings’ which are generated as other YouTube users post their own comments or interpretations in response.

9. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXQCZOuR3AA, accessed 18th March 2012.

10. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daiw1J90hJA , accessed 18th March 2012.

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