Bottled water – Or: The power of discourse (again)
Flipping through Garry Petersons´s blog on Resilience Science I stumbled across the topic of bottled water. Watching “The story of bottled water” I felt a bit ashamed (yes I bought bottled water): Plastic made out of finite oil, waste tourism and the manipulation of society by economic interests: After spending three minutes on a YouTube search I felt better, when I found an environmentally sensitive spokesperson from Nestle, assuring me I did the right thing: By the way, thanks Nestle for offering me water as “healthy alternative, with zero sugar, calories or caffeine”. What astonishes me is the distance of just a few clicks between two very different discoursive positions and the space between them: the classical show off between eco- and business-talk. The heavy use of we-them narratives (le bien, le mal) to contrast oneself (good) with the opponent (bad) reminded me again of the power of frames produced in discourses: „Framing is a way of selecting, organizing, interpreting, and making sense of a complex reality to provide guideposts for knowing, analyzing, persuading and …