Social media affordances for curbing alcohol consumption: insights from Hello Sunday Morning blog posts

Social media are important platforms for the performance and promotion of alcohol consumption. This chapter introduces the concept of 'affordances' and articulate how a particular type of social media – weblogs (hereafter, 'blogs') used in health promotion – affords unknown users opportunities to curb their alcohol consumption behaviours. It examines how the Hello Sunday Morning (HSM) blogging site is being used, as well as users' motivations for using blogs, during a period of alcohol abstinence. The chapter shows that HSM blogging sites are not perceived or used because of their qualities or properties as such, but rather as functionally meaningful entities – the 'official' HSM blogging site affords accessibility, anonymity and interactivity tied to self-understanding, self-talk and self-commitment. It discusses the different 'action' models that have been used vis-a-vis alcohol consumption: the temperance model; the responsible decision-making model; the lifestyle risk-reduction model; and the community-level alcohol intervention model