ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how social media have complicated the already difficult matter of conceiving the relationship between commercial messages and alcohol abuse. It explains the value of a 'Cultural Indicators Project' (CIP) perspective, by showing how Gerbner's late twentieth-century work on alcohol and drugs contextualised 'risk' in the political climate of global commercial media culture, predicting many of the issues that young people now face when it comes to making sense of alcohol messages. The chapter examines public involvement in UK advertising regulation. It then considers CIP methods to find evidence of restrictions that advertising, marketing and regulatory frameworks build around public debate on media and well-being. The CIP mapped the social effects of living in pervasive media environments where privately owned media industries monopolise the ideas, images and stories that people have always used to make sense of the world, converting audience attention into revenue and corporate sponsorship.
