Paul Manning

Drugs and Popular Culture in the Age of New Media
Chapter Abstracts
1). Introduction: Cultures of Intoxication
The introduction sets out the main argument of the book which is to consider the impact that the arrival of ‘new media’ have had upon popular drugs cultures but also strategies for ‘mediated drugs education’. In the past governments and drugs agencies assumed ‘control’ over the mediation of drugs messages but this is no longer tenable. The introduction also reviews the most recent evidence from Britain, the US, Europe, and Australia relating to patterns of drug use and whether or not drugs have been ‘normalised’.
2). Representing Drugs and Intoxication in Popular Media
Chapter two reviews the representation of drugs in ‘old’ media including news media, television drama and cinema. It looks at the ways in which ‘drug news’ is gathered and produced, the role of news sources, and official agencies in this process. It argues that distinct symbolic frameworks organise these patterns of representation and associate particular substances with particular social identities and locations. While some news coverage stygmatizes drug use, there is evidence of ‘normalisation’ in some news and also some US and British television comedy and also screen drama.
3). The Mediated Regulation of Intoxication in the Age of ‘Old’ Media: the US Experience from ‘Reefer Madness’ to ‘Just Say No’
Chapter three examines the emergence of mediated drugs education in the United States from the second half of the nineteenth century, through the ‘addiction narratives’ in early cinema, the role of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in the production of the ‘reefer madness’ films of the 1930s, and the ‘mental hygiene’ short films of the post-war era, up to the ‘Just Say No’ campaigns that emerged with the War on Drugs in the 1970s and 1980s. It suggests that mediated drugs education or propaganda develops as key elements in the ‘control regimes’ that regulated licit and illicit drug use, through specific historical periods.
4). Drugs Regulation and Mediated Drugs Education in Britain
The fourth chapter looks at the emergence of formal drug regulation in Britain and draws some important contrasts with the US. Although the movement to regulate intoxication emerged in Britain during the second half of the nineteenth century, in Britain a medical model of treatment triumphed over the prohibitionist campaigns that were so influential in the US. As a result the ‘British system’ of treatment dominated until the 1960s. One consequence of this was the striking absence of any mediated drugs education until the 1980s. This chapter draws on original archive research to expose the apprehensions that British policy makers had regarding the use of what they feared were dangerously powerful tools of mass communication. The final section of this chapter critically reviews the evidence regarding the effectiveness of mediated drugs education.

5). New Media, Popular Culture and Cultures of Intoxication
The fifth chapter is divided into three sections. The first explores what is distinctive about ‘new media’ by rehearsing some of the key points in the debates between ‘cyber utopians’ and ‘cyber pessimists’. In particular, it explores the idea of the network society. The second section resumes the history of mediated drugs education by critically evaluating the use made by drugs agencies in Britain and the US of new media. The final section describes the explosion in information flows circulated by the thousands of non-official drug related web sites to be found now in cyberspace and considers the implication of these both for popular drugs cultures and mediated drugs education.
6). Virtual Intoxication: YouTube and Popular Drugs Culture
The sixth chapter reports on original research conducted to explore the drug discourses circulated by YouTube. YouTube is one of the most important examples of Web 2.0 technologies that allow consumers to become producers of meaning. A sample of 750 drug videos was analyzed to assess the ways in which drugs and practices of intoxication are represented and discussed on YouTube. While there are many videos that ‘celebrate’ intoxication there are also almost as many that ‘discipline’ through the circulation of ‘cautionary tales’. There are also videos that serve as consumer reviews, those that actually market substances in the ‘grey’ market, jostling alongside official drugs education.
7). Conclusion: Virtual Intoxication, Drug Styles and the Way We Consume

The final chapter draws the argument together by examining the ways that drug discourses emerge through the conversations that are sustained in YouTube comment strings. The chapter begins by reviewing the extensive literature on drug cultures and the ways in which individuals calculate risk against pleasure in shaping their ‘drug styles’. It is suggested that theories of risk and theories of normalisation sometimes underestimate the collective, shared nature of ‘intoxicative practices’. Analysis of the YouTube comment strings reveal critical, sceptical and empirically grounded approaches towards drug discourses which can serve as resources for social actors navigating their way through the volume of drug information and images now in circulation in late modern capitalism. A more effective drugs education will emphasise skills for the critical evaluation of media alongside skills for harm reduction.

This is a research monograph which analyses the history of trade union media strategies and assesses their success. There is also a focus upon the work of industrial and labour correspondents and their 'exchange relationships' with union press officers.

The book explores the power relationships underpinning the deployment of symbolic and material resources in the struggle to secure access to news agendas. It offers a particular theoretical framework but also discusses a range of research on both the powerful and the politically marginalised organisations and the media strategies they employ.

The use of illegal drugs is so common that a number of commentators now refer to the'normalisation'of drug consumption. It is surprising, then, that to date very little academic work has explored drug use as part of contemporary popular culture. This collection of readings will apply an innovatory, multi-disciplinary approach to this theme, combining some of the most recent research on'the normalisation thesis' with fresh work on the relationship between drug use and popular culture.

The rationale for this collection of papers is certainly ambitious, both theoretically and as a publishing project. Each chapter has been contributed by a student or former student within the Department of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths College, University of London.

It is less common these days to come across research monographs based upon classical participant observation in the tradition established by Whyte's Street Corner Society (1943). The privations associated with this research strategy and the pressure to produce research outputs within evershortening time frames mean that it is too often a problematic choice for both new and established researchers.

Abstract This article explores the rise and decline of daily labour and industrial journalism in Britain from the 1930s to the present day. This represents the loss of an important arena within the public sphere for the discussion of work-related issues. Conventional explanations for the decline in this specialism point to the diminishing newsworthiness of trade unions. However, this is an oversimplification.

his paper focuses upon the strategies adopted by national (as distinct from international or global) news agencies, to adapt to the acceleration of technological convergence and the more intense pressures to commodify information, that characterise the early twenty-first century. Organisations such as Reuters began to develop strategies of diversification a decade ago and are now in strong global positions to exploit technologies of convergence to maximise the commodification of information across a variety of online markets. However, this paper will focus mainly upon the Press Association (PA) which has only adopted a strategy of diversification through the use of convergent technologies since the start of the new century. The paper will chart the changes adopted by the PA in the last decade, based around the development of the PA Group, including PA Sport, PA Entertainment, and PA Business, to sit alongside the PA news agency. The PA Group now sells a diverse range of products, all related to or spun off from the original core activity of wholesaling news copy and all based upon the exploitation of new convergent technologies. The paper will explore what the implications of such developments are both for the kinds of news produced and for the journalists working within such regimes of intensified information commodification.

One of the most notable features of the recent and continuing global banking crisis has been the failure of financial journalism, together with the global news agencies, to alert us to the signs of imminent catastrophe, thus confounding over-simplistic models of journalism as an efficient system of antennae monitoring the external environment. With a handful of honourable exceptions, most financial journalists and most international news agencies simply failed to report much of the emerging evidence of the growing possibility of collapse. Various explanations have been proposed for this failure including the complexities of the evidence, the manipulative power of financial public relations, and the difficulties of undertaking investigative journalism when newsrooms cut staff. This article, drawing on a theoretical framework for analysing exchange relationships between journalists and their sources first developed in Manning (2001), argues that a more fully developed explanation needs to explore the ways in which a distribution of political and symbolic power shaped relationships between financial correspondents, news agencies and the key information flows operating within global financial systems.

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.




Read More: http://informahealthcare.com/doi/abs/10.3109/09687637.2012.704435?journalCode=dep

The YouTube Drug Videos Project has included a content analysis of a sample of 750 'drug videos'. This is the raw data. The analysis of this data together with a further analysis of comment networks is the subject of two papers currently under review.

Eighty search terms were used to capture drugs used for the purposes of intoxicaton ('drug videos') accessible through YouTube. These included classified substances, common solvents, and legal highs. Nine additional terms were added to caputre drugs education videos available on YouTube. This search provided two estimates of the overall number of 'drugs videos' loaded to the site in March 2012.

Eighty search terms were used to capture drugs used for the purposes of intoxicaton ('drug videos') accessible through YouTube. These included classified substances, common solvents, and legal highs. Nine additional terms were added to caputre drugs education videos available on YouTube. This search provided two estimates of the overall number of 'drugs videos' loaded to the site in March 2012.

This paper discusses some of the methodological issues associated with the YouTube and Drug Videos Project. The data gathered through the content analyis of 750 YouTube 'drug videos' and their comments are presented in a separate file. Two articles are currently under review and a book for Routledge is scheduled for publication later in 2013.

News Sources, News Agencies and the Banking Crisis  - Paul Manning
One of the most notable features of the recent and continuing global banking crisis has been the failure of financial journalism, together with the global news agencies, to alert us to the signs of imminent catastrophe, thus confounding over-simplistic models of journalism as an efficient system of antennae monitoring the external environment. With a handful of honourable exceptions, most financial journalists and most international news agencies simply failed to report much of the emerging evidence of the growing possibility of collapse. Various explanations have been proposed for this failure including the complexities of the evidence, the manipulative power of financial public relations, and the difficulties of undertaking investigative journalism when newsrooms cut staff. This article drawing upon a theoretical framework for analysing exchange relationships between journalists and their sources first developed in Manning (2001), will argue that a more fully developed explanation needs to explore the ways in which a distribution of political and symbolic power shaped relationships between financial correspondents, news agencies and the key information flows operating within global financial systems.

This article explores the rise and decline of daily labour and industrial journalism in Britain from the 1930s to the present day. This represents the loss of an important arena within the public sphere for the discussion of work-related issues. Conventional explanations for the decline in this specialism point to the diminishing newsworthiness of trade unions. However, this is an oversimplification. While changes in the political and economic environment are clearly important, attention also has to be paid to the relationships or power-webs, involving journalists and members of the political and labour movement elites, which sustain or block crucial information flows and support or undermine particular categories of knowledge. The hierarchical ordering and instability of categories of knowledge for journalists is intimately connected to particular forms of governmentality.

The symbolism of substance misuse is a familiar theme. However, relatively little attention has been paid specifically to the nature of the symbolic frameworks through which substance misuse is represented and even less attention to the part played by the news media in the reproduction of these symbolic frameworks. This article takes volatile substance abuse (VSA) and ecstasy as examples through which to explore the ways in which news production processes, together with the symbolic and inferential frameworks employed by journalists, intersect with structures of disadvantage, to reproduce particular news discourses or ways of understanding substance misuse. It suggests that VSA receives very little attention in the United Kingdom national press in comparison to ‘spectacular’, or ‘glamorous’ drugs such as ecstasy, despite the evidence available that VSA represents a problem of, at least, equivalent magnitude, if recorded associated annual deaths are taken as the measures of ‘seriousness’. It is suggested that significantly different symbolic frameworks are deployed in national newspapers to represent the ‘problems’ associated with VSA and ecstasy, and that these differences are explicable in terms of the cultural assumptions and inferential frameworks underpinning news production, together with news source activity, and the marketing strategies of newspapers in an era of intensified news commodification.