MARKET WATCH COLUMNIST
“YouTube Brawlers get more than 15 minutes” , Newsday, December 5, 2010
Smile, you’re on YouTube – whether you want to be or not.
Just ask those two kids who got into a fight Monday afternoon outside Half Hollow Hills High School East. Ask the student who recorded the brawl with a cell-phone camera and the one who posted the action on YouTube. Ask the five who either stood nearby or egged the fighters on, offering helpful suggestions like: “Hit him in the face.”
Most of them sure didn’t ask to be a worldwide digital-video attraction. Yet here each of them was, with hundreds of thousands of digital page views and real-life suspensions closer to home.
Are school-yard fistfights all that unusual? No.
Was this one especially brutal or cruel? No again.
Half Hollow Hills spokeswoman Chris Geed had a point when she said: “I don’t want to say this happens every day at every school in America. But it happens frequently.”
So why all the uproar? One reason alone.
This school-yard fight was captured on video (http://tinyurl.com/HighSchoolFight)
and made instantly available around the world. Thousands watched, and that changed everything. No one could ignore the little fight now.
The media were asking questions. School officials were called to task. The machinery of high-school discipline rumbled into overdrive.
And the kids on the scene were the ones who paid the price.
This is no isolated development. This won’t be the last famous school-yard fight.
Almost everyone carries a cell phone now. Security cameras are everywhere. Some seemingly minor incident can go viral in a matter of minutes, turning anonymous people into snap-of-the-finger Internet stars.
We’re the accidental stars of the tomorrow.
Even if we want to hide, fame will find us eventually.
YOU EDIT
1. YouArgue
2. YouYell
3. YouShove
4. YouPunch
5. YouInTroubleNow
ASKED AND UNANSWERED:
If a punch is thrown in a schoolyard and no one loads it onto YouTube, does the punch still hurt? . . . Can’t dog walkers and taxi drivers in Coram make some kind of deal? Walkers on the sidewalk, drivers in the street! John Becker should visit Metin Gilav in the hospital so both of them can sign . . . How ’bout LIU changes its name to iPU – for iPad University? 6,000 and counting. Says tech chief George Baroudi: “The mouse is dead! Long live the finger!” . . . World Cup 2022 on Long Island? Sorry, soccer fans. Not this Long Island, the one in Australia . . . Jets-Pats, both 9-2, heading into Monday night’s showdown? . . . Did that minor quake off eastern LI produce any minor aftershocks? Don’t get all philosophical on me! Hardly anyone felt anything . . . What’s up with Ed Mangano’s call to privatize Long Island Bus? Is it running out of gas?
LONG ISLANDERS OF THE WEEK
Rob Weltner and Operation SPLASH
Someone had to focus on Nassau County officials on Long Island’s own BP mess, a daily case of sewer dumping at Bay Park. Credit Weltner and his volunteer band of activists at Operation SPLASH (for Stop Polluting Littering and Save Harbors). After a Monday meeting with Shila Shah-Gavnoudias, the county’s public works commissioner grew concerned about “mechanical failures leading to discharges of excess treated solids…into Reynolds Channel since October 2010 and a visible brown plume coming from the Plant’s outfall structure in Reynolds Channel.” Yuck! Just clean it up, OK? And make sure the sludgy stuff doesn’t return.
E-mail ellis@henican.com. Follow him at twitter.com/henican
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