‘See it doesn’t look pretty does it?’ Young adults’ airbrushed drinking practices on Facebook

Abstract

A range of negative health outcomes are associated with young adults’ drinking practices. One key arena where images of, and interaction about, drinking practices occurs is social networking sites, particularly Facebook. This study investigated the ways in which young adults’ talked about and understood their uses of Facebook within their drinking practices. Face-to-face, semi-structured interviews were conducted with seven New Zealand young adults as they displayed, navigated and talked about their Facebook pages and drinking behaviours. Our social constructionist thematic analysis identified three major themes, namely ‘friendship group belonging’, ‘balanced self-display’ and ‘absences in positive photos’. Drinking photos reinforced friendship group relationships but time and effort was required to limit drunken photo displays to maintain an overall attractive online identity. Positive photos prompted discussion of negative drinking events which were not explicitly represented. Together these understandings of drinking photos function to delimit socially appropriate online drinking displays, effectively ‘airbrushing’ these visual depictions of young adults’ drinking as always pleasurable and without negative consequences. We consider the implications of these findings for ways alcohol health initiatives may intervene to reframe ‘airbrushed’ drinking representations on Facebook and provoke a deeper awareness among young people of drinking practices and their online displays.

Keywords:

• ‘young adults’
• Facebook
• photos
• drinking
• friendship
• identity

Acknowledgements

The authors declare no conflicting interests in this research and its publication. Supported by the Marsden Fund Council from Government funding, administered by the Royal Society of New Zealand (contract MAU0911). We thank two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this manuscript.