Drugs & Media : New Perspectives on Communication, Consumption, and Consciousness

This is a groundbreaking collection of essays highlighting the links between contemporary society's over-reliance on both media and drugs.

We have developed into a culture that is over-reliant upon pharmaceutical and recreational drugs; where drugs are incessantly advertised and promoted to us via our mass media.

Like drugs, communication media alter the way we interact with the world; they direct our attention in various ways, sometimes enabling certain behaviors and experiences, and prohibiting others.

The contributors to this cutting-edge collection apply media ecological concepts to consider how drugs function as communication technologies; literally media in and for the human sensorium.

In these essays, drugs are considered as communication media in a practical sense, not merely in the metaphorical way they tend to be discussed in the popular press.

Media and drugs are thus conceived as communicative tools that enhance and/or inhibit physical, social and symbolic experience - our ways of seeing and being in the world. "Drugs & Media: New Perspectives on Communication, Consumption and Consciousness" is the first book to examine this parallel, promoting a critical awareness of the significant impact of drugs and media on individuals, society and our wider human culture.