Part 6 ~ The Amphibian Poster-Child For the War Against the Plastic Straw
In August 2015, Christine Figgener, a marine conservation biologist, uploaded a video to YouTube (Figure 1). In the video, a sea turtle is held down by Figgener’s team of conservationists as she removes a plastic drinking straw from one of the turtle’s nostrils(Sea Turtle Biologist, 2015).
Figure 1. A screenshot of Christine Figgener’s YouTube video titled “Sea Turtle with Straw up its Nostril - “NO” TO PLASTIC STRAWS. The video has 38,406440 views.
Three years later, in 2018, the video ‘went viral’ and helped energise a large movement against the use of disposable plastic straws(Cuda 2015). The original video has been viewed over thirty-eight million times on Youtube alone(Sea Turtle Biologist, 2015). But in a digital landscape saturated with sensational images, all competing for our attention, why did this video ‘go viral’? Did this video stimulate actual positive action against global warming?
This video is an emotional watch; we see blood streaming down the turtle’s face as it groans in pain. In contrast to sharks, which have been painted as the villains of the ocean by the media, turtles have been romanticised. Through films such as Finding Nemo, the turtle is presented as a gentle and loveable creature. Therefore, a video that depicts a turtle in pain is especially emotionally provocative. Particularly when the “10-12cm plastic straw”(Sea Turtle Biologist, 2015) is revealed and the viewer is forced to accept that we humans are responsible for this turtle’s suffering.
The shaky hand-held camera movements and the fact that the video is an uncut eight minutes and six seconds, makes Figgener’s video very different to the high-production quality of campaigns and television shows that we had previously seen a lot of, such as Blue Planet II (the last episode of which aired on 1st January 2018(BBC One, 2017), not long before Figgener’s video went viral). This, alongside the fact that the video was uploaded by an individual, rather than a TV channel - or some other form of traditional media - makes the video seem much more authentic and trustworthy and, therefore, all the more shocking. And when something is shocking and emotional, not only does it stands out from other media, but we are more inclined to share it.
Emotion is the vehicle of the spectacle and it is the emotional evocativeness of this video that ferried it through the sea of spectacles and into such prominence.
The video aroused a new wave of anger amongst viewers; not only did this create a decline in the demand for plastic straws, but consumers actually demanded their abolition.
In this way, when content is sufficiently relevant and striking, the internet can be a force for spreading good messages and can facilitate positive movements.
