The turtle and the drinking straw

It has been more than a year since I feel incredibly guilty when I have to use a drinking straw when having a soda, a milkshake, or anything of the sort. I definitely try not to use a straw, but when I do, I feel that I am indirectly harming a turtle.

When you think carefully about it, this is an incredibly specific guilt: using a drinking straw (a particular piece of plastic implement) bodily harms (a rather direct form of damage) a turtle (one of the thousand possible species that can be damaged from contamination of the seas). And although the fact that many of the plastic straws thrown at the sea do hurt turtles on some occasions, it seems unjustified to have such a specific belief rather than a more general one, like "the use of  plastic commodities should be avoided as much as possible in order to reduce contamination".

However, it is this specific idea of harming turtles that has had impact all over the world, compelling people to a very specific action. This campaign has had much more relevance than many of its counterparts promoted by other environmental institutions. The question here is: What facts promoted the whole success of this idea, overpowering its many competitors, and making it matter?

Richard Dawkins explains the virality of some pieces of information, especially regarding its propagation, with his (1976) theory of memes (this is the original term, which later on was borrowed to name the clever images one finds on the internet). It portrays an image in which information is largely independent of the bearer because its own characteristics will determine its success.

However, this image of information going viral because of its content seems to me a bit like pointing at the moon and looking at the finger. To me, the issue of "what kind of information will have relevance among the vast sea of possibilities" depends largely on the subject (not on the content itself), because the formation of a belief will depend on other previous beliefs, and might also depend on the subject's values, social environment, mood, etc., among other things.  A particular instantiation could be that it is possible, given the circumstances, that equal content might go unnoticed by the subject depending on his mental state; for example, if I am in a bad mood I might not care about using a paper napkin that might potentially harm a tree in the rainforest.

Information, in this age, is a bit of an overflow for those of us who were not born with access to the internet. I think it is a great time to question what stays and what doesn't in people's minds.