Morally High: Is Twitter being used as an online space to challenge socio-political discourse around drug use?

Kieran Hamilton - Centre for Alcohol and Drug StudiesJennifer Jones - School of Creative and Cultural IndustriesUniversity of the West of Scotland

Focus of the paper ● Using available social media data & online research tools to begin

to understand viewer perceptions of novel psychoactive substances (aka ‘legal highs’) in context of negative socio-political discourse around drug use and users

● Encoding/Decoding - How was the television show “Legally High” positioned

● Was the tag #legallyhigh used to challenge, reaffirm or negotiate dominant discourse?

● Twitter data, collection & ethics - is public truly public? Contextualisation of the environment

Context: Drugs and the Media

●

Context: The Media, Discourse and Stigma

Drug users as folk devils

● Dirty● Stupid● Pathological (mental or physical)● Blameworthy - links to other social issues● Deviant - ‘other’ ‘outsider’● Subhuman

Context: Drug Users and Stigma

● Stigmatising portrayals contribute to discrimination adding social exclusion

● Barrier to treatment and services - increase in mortality and morbidity

● Barrier to recovery - education, training and employment

● Prevents political discussion of alternative approaches to drug policy

NPS: Legal Highs ● Analogue imitations of existing illegal drugs● Rec user disillusionment over high price, low purity of

illegal drugs● Policy allows unregulated market● Temporarily ‘legal’ i.e. not banned● Avoidance of illegal market and criminalisation and

convenience ● Little known about harms or ingredients - mislabelling

‘bath salts’ ‘plant food’ - forums

Channel 4’s Legally High: True Stories

#LegallyHigh

Three groups/individuals:● ‘Psychonaut’● recreational polydrug users● ‘Dr Z’ - chemist

New Media/Old Media

Broadcast vs interactive, many to many - convergence (Jenkins 2006) Combination of multiple screens, access to broadband and mobile devicesEvolution of the media space, ‘talk back’ to the television

TV and hashtags

New Media/Old Media Political agendas - prousers, construction of media reality. Affirming/Negotiating/Opposing dominant messages. Opportunity for alternative narratives, granular and disruptive - the user can become a story Social media as social data, explicit opinion that can be captured & visualised as a responseMarketing and promotion, audiences causing programmes to ‘trend’

Twitter as a research space

Big data, 8 years old. Twitter using data and data stream as revenue generation.Qualitative data in a quantitative way

Twitter as a research space

Hashtags as a research space Setting parametersInviting comment, opinion - but does not capture all possible responses (language & discourse)Individual user context, hard to generalise but can visual new social contexts What is the motivation for the TV/programme maker beyond ‘trending’?

TAGSv5: Archiving Tweets

Martin Hawksey - using Google Spreadsheet to archive twitter events (http://mashe.hawksey.info/2013/02/twitter-archive-tagsv5/)

Limitations

7 days of backdated tweets (proactive archive)15000 limit on tweets in entire spreadsheetNot all tweets are archived, limited access to twitter ‘datahose’Twitter API changes, Twitter blocking 3rd & 4th parties because data is money

Network Analysis

Twitter dataset #LegallyHigh

Network analysis: Broadcast, not conversational - individual users stating their opinion on the programme, rarely conversing with others about it

#LegallyHigh

Tweets: 325 analysedThe programme makers (@AmosPictures1)Three groups/individuals:● ‘Psychonaut’● recreational polydrug users● ‘Dr Z’ - chemist

Difficulty in categorisation - character limit, tone

AnalysisTentative findings: three distinct categories of tweet in relation to dominant discourse● Oppositional ● Negotiated/ambiguous● Dominant(Hall 1980)

Secondary categories: critical of producers, praise for programme, neutral/ambiguous and unrelated tweets

Oppositional

Roughly 7%

“Lots of judgers, how many of u use alcohol and tobacco, bigger killers than all the illegal drugs and legal highs put to…”

“Just watched #legallyhigh, proper grim in some parts. The UK's drug laws are a total joke. They need changing and people need to be educated”

“Catching up on #legallyhigh on channel 4 last night - time for the government to seriously rethink drug legislation”

Negotiatied/ambiguous

Roughly 30%:“him and his girlfriend are just gurning away, being filmed and testing their blood pressure #legallyhigh”

“If nothing else, #legallyhigh did a very good job of showing just how boring/banal hardcore drug taking is to outsiders”

“Watched #legallyhigh last night. It was all so my much simpler when I was18”

Dominant

Roughly 30%:“Just watched that #LegallyHigh programme, the people on it are fucking idiots”

“Watching this legal High thing. Absolutely crazy. What makes you waste your life like that. #legallyhigh”

“Am I really watching two spaced out dirty tramps inject snide ket on my television? #legallyhigh”

Discussion

Majority of tweets mirror dominant discourseHard to generalise, public not tweeting for researcher OR promoting Channel 4Ethics of using tweetsEphemeral nature of programme contextMotivation to tweet through programmes

Next steps

Develop code frame for understanding tweets, potential to use for other programme of similar natureExplore ethical considerations of using public data in this context