Toss a couple local search terms into the video Web site YouTube and you’ll find the winning goal of a Gorham-Westbrook soccer match, a handful of Westbrook students in France and a Bonny Eagle Middle School teacher playing with drumsticks in class. It’s all user-generated material seen by people all over the world.
YouTube videos have been blocked by various governments, flagged by users for inappropriate content, and recently have ended in some legal complications for some Bonny Eagle High School students, who filmed and posted a fight.
Police are investigating the fight between two juveniles, while about 80 others watched, on May 9 on Hall Road in Buxton, after school hours. Buxton Officer Kimberly Emery said last week possible charges included disorderly conduct and conspiracy. She said no one was injured in the fight. Emery said most of the teenagers at the fight were identified as Bonny Eagle High School students. Police are working with the York County District Attorney’s office in the investigation.
Bonny Eagle High School principal Robert Strong didn’t respond to telephone messages left with his office this week.
Created in February 2005, YouTube has become a wildly popular site where videos can be posted and rated. According to Google, which bought the company last year, YouTube delivers more than 100 million video views every day, with 65,000 new videos uploaded daily.
“The ability to do something without seeing someone face to face, it creates a bravery that normally wouldn’t be there,” said Cory Abbott, a Bonny Eagle Middle School eighth-grade history and algebra teacher.
Abbott’s drum solo on a 23-second YouTube video was posted by one of his students.
“I wasn’t pleased, because (the student) hadn’t asked,” Abbott said. He hadn’t been aware he was being filmed or about to receive YouTube fame, but the student told him a few days after she had posted it. After being told, he decided it wasn’t a problem, but, Abbott said, YouTube is part of school discussions fairly often.
At Bonny Eagle Middle School, due to the extreme nature of some of the material, the Web site is blocked from the school computers. Abbott said the cons of the Web site outweigh the pros.
The YouTube system allows anybody to upload videos to the Web site, and to tag the videos with keywords. It’s like posting a piece of paper to a corkboard with a giant title at the top of the paper denoting what the contents of the paper are. But YouTube relies on the users of its site to agree to certain terms that are often unread by the users. One of these terms includes the permission of any identifiable person in the video.
While some people post questionable material to the Web site, others are there just to show their friends what they’ve been up to.
Jake Cerf, a junior at Falmouth High School, uploaded a goofy video titled “Dance-Off ’06,” where he and his friends dance for a couple minutes in front of stationary camera. Shortly after, he said, MTV contacted him.
“Originally it was for a video production class,” said Cerf, who plays with filming and video editing as a hobby. After the video was posted, MTV contacted him looking for video of students dancing at prom. His prom wasn’t until after MTV’s deadline for submissions, but they put together another video anyway. The second video is a 10-minute story of a dance-off for territory between a few prom-goers and a fisherman at the ocean in Falmouth.
“We thought it’d be pretty hysterical,” Cerf said. “Friends making fools of themselves on a pretty big scale.”
For Cerf, the power of people connecting through YouTube is at the heart of why he uses it.
“It’s testing the system,” he said of his own posts, noting the amazement he had when he saw that his first video had been viewed more than 4,000 times.
Staff reporter Robert Lowell also contributed to this story.
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