ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores how identities play out across drinking cultures and social media and how this is intimately linked to social relations and power. It describes three important areas that are involved in youth drinking cultures in a digital world, namely identities, social relations and power; alcohol marketing and commercialisation; and public health and regulating alcohol promotion. The book also explores how alcohol interests increasingly employ social media systems to create sophisticated marketing strategies, and the ways in which young people actively and passively engage with corporate content online. It then consider the new challenges and possibilities that social media and digital technologies afford for health promotion, public health and health policy. Regulation and legislation is discussed in terms of the ineffective industry voluntary codes for the digital environment and the innovative regulation that Finland adopted from 2016 to control online alcohol marketing.
