The pedagogy of regret: Facebook, binge drinking and young women

Abstract

This article introduces the idea of a ‘pedagogy of regret’ to illustrate some of the inadequacies in recent government policy initiatives which target young women's drinking practices. In the Australian context, the National Binge Drinking Campaign warned young women: ‘Don't turn a night out into a nightmare’. A similar British campaign advised individualized drinkers to ‘know their limits’. The rhetorical appeal of these campaigns hinges on the notion of regret: young women will lament the excesses of hedonistic indulgence the morning after given the inevitable consequences of risky behaviour. This paper shows the limitations of such an appeal through a ‘sympathetic online cultural studies’ approach, which we use to explore the nexus between contemporary drinking cultures and the social networking site Facebook. Ordinary and mundane uses of Facebook – status updates anticipating the weekend, mobile posts in the midst of intoxication, photo uploading and album dissemination the morning after – reveal the anticipatory pleasures, everyday preparations and retrospective bonding involved in hedonistic and risky alcohol consumption. This demonstrates the fundamentally social dimensions accompanying young women's drinking. The enjoyment derived from sharing the ‘risky’ and ‘regrettable’ experience on Facebook is part of ongoing narratives between girls. Such pleasures, which are increasingly mediated by social networking sites, confound the notion that young women are haunted by inevitable regret and remorse.

Notes

 1. While we are conscious of the complexities surrounding the terms ‘youth’ and ‘young people’, we use them broadly in the spirit of this special issue.

 2. Despite driving alcohol policy in both Britain and Australia, ‘binge drinking’ is a vague and ambiguous concept that is widely contested. In the public imagination, binge drinking is associated with risky and hedonistic drinking styles linked to violence, disorder and excessive intoxication, predominantly within the licensed precincts of night-time economies. Official definitions of binge drinking are typically numerical and vary across nation-states but the term is also used interchangeably with descriptive definitions such as heavy drinking, episodic drinking, sessional drinking and, more simply, drinking to get drunk (see Gill, Murdoch, and O'May 2009). Binge drinking has therefore been described as a ‘confused concept’ (Herring, Berridge, and Thom 2008). Critics of this emotive and negative label have described how binge drinking rhetoric is used in political manoeuvres which unfairly target the drinking practices of the young, thereby obscuring the state's responsibility in regard to the deregulation of the alcohol industry (see Hayward and Hobbs 2007; Measham and Brain 2005). For these reasons, Martinic and Measham (2008) suggest replacing the unhelpful and pejorative ‘binge drinking’ with the more positive and productive ‘extreme drinking’. While acknowledging these wider debates, we use the term binge drinking throughout this paper to refer to contemporary drinking styles which policy discourse deems problematic.

 3. The British and Australian examples in this paper emerge from the current doctoral project of one of the authors. As a British citizen completing her PhD in Australia, Rebecca is conducting empirical research in both countries to investigate the drinking practices of young women in post-industrial night-time economies. While there are sociocultural and political differences to be expected between the UK and Australia, similarities link alcohol discourse in both locations, specifically to the extent that the respective governments locate the problem of binge drinking as one of young people getting excessively drunk. Debate on both sides of the globe revolves around themes of moderation and responsibility. While there is a more developed history of public and academic discourse on binge drinking in the UK, for example regarding the relationship with violence, urban regeneration, concerns over licensing hours and gendered media representations (Hayward and Hobbs 2007; Measham and Brain 2005; Plant and Plant 2006; Day, Gough, and McFadden 2004), similar concerns emerge in the Australian literature (see Bavinton 2010; Kypri et al. 2011; Lindsay 2005; Moore 2010; Tomsen 1997; Waitt, Jessop, and Gorman-Murray 2011; Zadjow 2008).

 4. Here we draw on the notion of ‘sympathetic criticism’ as outlined by Morris (1988).

 5. At the time of writing the campaign was live and was hosted at an official site which no longer exists. It is archived at: http://www.drinkingnightmare.gov.au/internet/DrinkingNightmare/publishing.nsf. Accessed December 18, 2011.

 6. Available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = DkScHtrowM8. Accessed December 18, 2011.

 7. A similar tendency appears to be colouring recent debates about “sexting”, as discussed by Albury, Funnell, and Noonan (2010).

 8. Available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = BYwu-MPPwrU. Accessed December 18, 2011.

 9. Available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = 3jftfU30xJgandfeature = related. Accessed December 18, 2011.

10. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v = nuo5xrpEDCA Accessed December 18, 2011.

11. These status updates have been paraphrased to remove the names of individuals and locations but remain true to their original form.

12. Race (2011) describes this in the context of queer communities in Sydney.

13. This lends weight to the idea that binge drinking campaigns are actually designed to placate the concerns of parents – that their ideal viewer is actually an adult. Here an apt analogy is the anti-piracy ads that open cinema screenings, which can only ever be a performance for the benefit of viewers who remain willing to pay for films.