Look at the image to the left of this text. What do you see? On one level it is just a water bottle, as much as anything can be 'just' something in an ontological sense. But have you ever stopped to think about what such an item means? Water bottles are not a recent phenomenon of course, although the aggressive marketing of such an item is relatively new. Why do we, and I include myself in this question, get suckered in to buying something that is so artfully designed to work against many basic notions of individual human life? This may seem a strange question, and it probably is, but bear with me a while whilst I attempt to deconstruct the social conditioning embodied within the cultural artefact pictured above.Consumerist conditioning: The water bottle is a symbol of pure capitalist excess. When you live in a country which has clean and drinkable water freely available (water rates excepted), why do you choose to pay for it? Is it a style issue, a convenience issue, a health issue? It can of course be all of these things but all of those are superficial and market constructed concerns. Drinking from a water bottle sends out the message that one can afford to purchase a drink but that we choose to make it a low-calorie healthy option. The companies that produce bottled water have tapped in (sorry) to contemporary mores regarding status and bodily awareness and, as such companies are wont to do, have found a way to produce maximum profit from these anxieties.
Infantilised consumer: The advent of the sports-cap is a particularly pernicious development in the water-bottle market. Such a device appears to be a matter of ultimate convenience. Now you don't need to use two hands to drink the water that you have paid over the odds for...Hooray. But what is actually occurring is an atavistic return to the drinking motion of the baby, clamping on to a sublimated nipple, suckling from the corporate teat. The sports cap, ironically named considering how many people sat on trains, in cars or in offices are using them, is also ideally designed for the third of my complaints.
Reified through water: The rise of water bottles is surely connected to the busier, more work orientated lives that we are made to live in contemporary society. Rather than drinking being a social activity, harking back to a primeval memory of the waterhole, water bottles enable/disable the individual by allowing them to drink at the place of work. The one-handed sports cap exacerbates this condition by ensuring that the other hand can be continually employed by the worker. The next step must surely be the enforced wearing of those tasteful baseball hats with straws and beverages attached, leaving both hands free to continue the drudgery of working existence.
So what is the answer? Should we boycott the bottled water industry, and instead use the taps that are ubiquitous in the western world? Well, yes and no. Turning our backs on 'progress' simply because we reveal the capitalist conditioning that underpins it is tempting, but ultimately such a choice is a Pyrrhic victory. By all means buy a bottle of water if you are thirsty, but make sure that you take that bottle home and refill it (despite the wonderfully capitalist warning on the bottle instructing you not to do so) and perhaps consider donating a small amount to a charity such as Water Aid, striving to enable millions to have the clean water that we have taken for granted so much as to ignore. Next time you pull out your sports cap bottle on the bus, holding your paper/book/Iphone/Ipod etc in the free hand, or sit in the office, typing away whilst attached to the sublimated teat of all that is wrong with this capitalist world, stop and think about what it is you are doing.
