Discussing illicit drugs in public internet forums: Visibility, stigma, and pseudonymity.
Access Status
Fulltext not available
Authors
Barratt, Monica
Date
2011Collection
Type
Conference Paper
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
It has been claimed that people discuss their own illicit drug use online because anonymity allows them to avoid the legal and social risks of identifying themselves as drug users. Discourses around the risks, strategies and management of online drug discussion were produced by interviewing 26 ‘party drug’ users who reported participating in internet forums where drugs were discussed. Three factors influenced the extent to which drug forum users discussed their own drug use in public internet forums: perceived visibility, perceived legal risk and social stigma, and perceived effectiveness of pseudonymity. Implications for internet research with drug users are discussed.
Citation
Barratt, Monica. 2011. Discussing illicit drugs in public internet forums: Visibility, stigma, and pseudonymity, in Kjeldskov, J. and Paay, J (ed), Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Communities and Technologies, Jun 29 2011, pp. 159-168. Brisbane: Association for Computing Machinery.
Source Title
C&T '11. Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Communities and Technologies
Additional URLs
School
National Drug Research Institute (Research Institute)
Related items
Showing items related by title, author, creator and subject.
-
Barratt, Monica; Lenton, Simon (2010)The use of the Internet by people who use drugs presents an opportunity for researchers not only to successfully recruit drug users to participate in research, but to go further and engage drug users more fully in dialogue. ...
-
Stevens, A.; Barratt, M.; Lenton, Simon; Ridout, M.; Winstock, A. (2015)This paper uses data from the Global Drug Survey to test the hypothesis that there is social bias in the policing of drug users, in the form of stop and search for drugs. The Global Drug Survey is a self-report, internet ...
-
Barratt, Monica (2012)Introduction and Aims. Despite the fact that most young people who use ‘party drugs’ also use the Internet, accounts of drugs research involving qualitative interviewing using real-time instant messaging or online chat ...