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

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.     

Taking Pictures of Jesus: Producing the Material Presence of a Divine Other

A new form of visual representation of divine others is emerging: photography. I examine here a set of photos of deities related to an apparition claim. The goal I pursue is to analyze the self-constitutive features of these pictures – how they produce what they claim to be. I argue that the “presence' of the deities in the photos is achieved through “incarnation practices.' But these pictures are not just a factual representation of alleged mystical events. They constitute an update and a variation on the “Grand Christian Narrative' wherein the factual poses the moral problem of belief. In that sense, divine photography does not modify the epistemology of religious belief.     

Why do doctored images distort memory?

Doctored images can cause people to believe in and remember experiences that never occurred, yet the underlying mechanism(s) responsible are not well understood. How does compelling false evidence distort autobiographical memory? Subjects were filmed observing and copying a Research Assistant performing simple actions, then they returned 2 days later for a memory test. Before taking the test, subjects viewed video-clips of simple actions, including actions that they neither observed nor performed earlier. We varied the format of the video-clips between-subjects to tap into the source-monitoring mechanisms responsible for the ‘doctored-evidence effect.’ The distribution of belief and memory distortions across conditions suggests that at least two mechanisms are involved: doctored images create an illusion of familiarity, and also enhance the perceived credibility of false suggestions. These findings offer insight into how external evidence influences source-monitoring.     

Challenge and Conformity on “Contested Terrain”: Images of Women in Four Women’s Sport/Fitness Magazines

Women’s sport magazines were launched during the mid-to-late 1990s as a response to the growing women’s sport movement in the United States. These magazines, including Real Sports, Sports Illustrated for Women, and Women’s Sports & Fitness, were marketed as more active and sport-focused than established titles such as Shape, a popular magazine launched during the early 1980s for fitness-oriented women. Shape has been criticized by scholars for reinforcing male hegemony in US culture through its emphasis on sexual difference. In the present research, we analyzed photo images presented in Sports Illustrated for Women, Women’s Sports & Fitness, and Real Sports to assess the reinforcement or rejection of sexual difference in these magazines as gauged against the presentation of sexual difference in Shape. The results show that the newer magazines do, to varying degrees, contest male hegemony more than Shape does. The impact of these magazines is discussed, and we speculate on the reasons that, although Shape continues to thrive, these magazines have ceased publication.