171 Media and Health A Continuing Concern for Health Psychology TAKE A MOMENT and consider the last 24 hours, reflecting on your interactions with any form of media. Very few of us would not have interacted with a variety of media within that timeframe. Our daily lives are punctuated with mediated experiences, communications via tele- phone, email or chat rooms and engagements with television, radio, magazines, newspapers, websites, digital games, billboards, packaging and advertising. Our engagements with media are not simple; we use the media for such things as communicating with others, maintaining social networks, accessing information, staying informed, sustaining a sense of self and place and gaining pleasure and entertainment. Much of the content of these media forms and experi- ences involve health, broadly defined. An obvious example is provided by public health campaigns, but there are many more general examples including encounters with advertise- ments promoting healthy food, news reports on the wonders of modern medicine, websites offering information on healthy lifestyles and Internet forums providing dialogue around healthy communities. Psychologists have studied processes of public communication and been involved in shaping media content for nearly 100 years (Kirschner & Kirschner, 1997). We have contributed advice columns, written self-improvement books, hosted radio shows, featured as experts on reality TV programmes and evaluated web-based efforts to educate people about a raft of health concerns. Increased recognition of such efforts is reflected in the development of media psychol- ogy practice guidelines by the American Psycho- logical Association (www.apa.org/divisions/ div46). Media remain even more relevant to psychological research and practice because public consumption of various news and enter- tainment forms is a primary leisure activity. From reading newspapers, listening to the radio or surfing the Web, people come to understand what is happening in different communities, what issues they should be concerned about and how these issues should be resolved (Hodgetts & Chamberlain, 2003). Media have been explored as a source of shared experience that we all use to understand the world and our place in it (Hodgetts, Bolam, & Stephens, 2005). This raises issues regarding what we are offered and how media content can enhance or undermine our collective lives and health. Psychologists have often conceptualized the media as a battleground between ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ messages (Blackman & Walkerdine, 2001; Kirschner & Kirschner, 1997; Livingstone, 2000). They have been concerned with the possi- ble effects of ‘unhealthy messages’ and with developing strategies for using media to promote ‘healthy messages’. When reflecting on this preoccupation, Katz’s (1959) famous call for a shift in focus on ‘what the media do to people’ to ‘what people do with the media’ is highly rele- vant. Today, we need to consider both media influence on public understandings and related health practices as well as how audiences can select, ignore, criticize, accept or appropriate media prescriptions for health (Hodgetts & Chamberlain, 2003). When investigating such processes we need to realize that the role of media in health is much more complex than the mere transfer of specific information. Media provide shared spaces for engaging in collective practices through which belonging and partici- pation can be fostered, supportive networks can be maintained and a sense of trust and belong- ing can be cultivated (Hodgetts et al., 2005). Journal of Health Psychology Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi, www.sagepublications.com Vol 11(2) 171–174 DOI: 10.1177/1359105306061172