When I was an assistant instructor at The University of Texas at Austin, giving students an introduction to rhetorical concepts, writing, and argumentation, I used to have them bring in an object from their daily lives to analyze. They would have to say, this is an X that I got from Y, which is near my Z, and here’s what I think it says about me. This was a way to talk about how ethos is situated, emplaced, relative, and communicated through artifacts as well as words. I always used an Ethos water bottle from Starbucks to model the assignment. “This is a bottle of Ethos water that I got from Starbucks, which is near my office.” (It was a cubicle.) “It suggests that I’m not above going to Starbucks and paying for water, even though I like other coffee shops better and I like to use reusable water bottles more. It also says that words like ‘ethos’ jump out at me.” It was a bit cute, but at least it reinforced the concept of ethos, which I still find to be useful. That assignment came to mind recently when I read an article in The Washington Post about Gwyneth Paltrow’s Water Bottle that lightly analyzed the significance of the brand of water she carried with her.
I felt the urge to comment on it, but I no longer knew to whom, or why, or really what was going on behind the scenes. In our current media landscape, doing the kind of rhetorical analysis I did with my students feels almost impossible. Her hoisting of a large glass water bottle during a trial felt extra product-placement-y or at the very least awkward. (I took a similar bottle to a job interview one time and the interviewer said he thought at first I was drinking a 40, which I mention only to say that the experience of drinking from it is not like a drinking from a plastic bottle of Dasani. It’s too big for a car’s cup holder. It’s breakable.) Suggesting that a water company paid Gwyneth Paltrow to drink their water during a court trial about a skiing accident seems both extremely plausible and mildly paranoid. If it was part of a media campaign for the water company, then saying anything about its meaning in relation to Paltrow is almost irrelevant. It has to be understood as part of the tradition of celebrity endorsement, a financial transaction. If it’s not part of an official campaign, does that even matter? Is the display of any product in the hands of any celebrity a de facto endorsement? Are we to believe that no one was coaching a lifestyle influencer about what the artifacts she carried prominently said about her? Perhaps the explanation is that she’s is really good at cultivating her own ethos, and/or making her own deals. Skepticism is probably warranted, but isn’t it always? The oscillation between skepticism and trust at some point led me to think, “Does any of this matter? What’s the point? I don’t actually care what brand of water Paltrow drinks in any context, and I don’t care what it says about her. So why did I feel the need to comment? Did the algorithms make me do it? Why put another lukewarm take out there amid all the noise? Why write at all?