Drugs and Popular Culture in the Age of New Media

Drawing on criminology, media studies, and sociology, this book examines the ways in which new media - including social networking and video file-sharing sites - transforms the symbolic framework in which drugs and drug culture are represented. It argues that much traditional mediated drugs education has been based upon linear models of centralised or "top-down" "mass communication," and suggests that while the effectiveness of such campaigns was always open to question, in an age of new interactive media, such approaches are redundant.

This book examines the history of popular drug cultures and mediated drug education, and the ways in which new media - including social networking and video file-sharing sites - transform the symbolic framework in which drugs and drug culture are represented. Tracing the emergence of formal drug regulation in both the US and the United Kingdom from the late nineteenth century, it argues that mass communication technologies were intimately connected to these "control regimes" from the very beginning. Manning includes original archive research revealing official fears about the use of such mass communication technologies in Britain. The second half of the book assesses on-line popular drug culture, considering the impact, the problematic attempts by drug agencies in the US and the United Kingdom to harness new media, and the implications of the emergence of many thousands of unofficial drug-related sites.