Living in YouTube Infamy

An article in the first issue of the re- re-launched Radar magazine looks at how ordinary people are made involuntarily "famous" by embarassing video clips that show up on the Web and then spread like wildfire. Not unexpectedly, most people aren't so psyched about their accidental "celebrity."

The author of the piece pores through many of the well known cases of humiliation-by-Web-video, trying to divine something about what it means to our society, but doesn't come up with much more than "It sucks to be humiliated in front of millions of people, but it's hard to avoid." Still, with its inclusion of the familiar Web video clips
you know and love (Star Wars kid, Alexey Vayner, etc..) -- as well as a few others -- it's a nice overview of the Web embarassment genre:

An emerging facet of YouTube humiliation [is] the tactic of deliberately provoking a teacher or coworker into a rage for the express purpose of posting the resulting drama online. A search for "screaming teacher" turns up dozens of clips on the site. The most celebrated case involved an as-yet-unnamed teacher in Quebec whose class goaded him into an outburst in November. The 32-year veteran, who specialized in teaching kids with discipline problems, went on stress leave after the video hit YouTube. Though it has since been taken down at the request of the school—which banned camera phones after the incident—it has sparked a wider, global debate about the wisdom of allowing cell phones in class. Quebec is now considering banning them in schools throughout the province, and Scotland's largest teachers' union called for barring them from classrooms in December.