You’re walking down the hallway when suddenly you hear a chorus of “Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!” somewhere behind you. You turn around and sure enough, you see two guys throwing punches at each other as the surrounding people hurry to crowd around them—all of them pulling their cell phones out and pointing them at the brawl. Soon enough, there will be about a dozen videos of that fight all over YouTube.
This has become nothing unusual. These days, any fight on the street or at school is almost guaranteed to be posted on YouTube; all you need to do is search “chick fight” or even “Alisal fights” and you’ll get hundreds of results. Most of the time, these fights seem to happen spontaneously, though often the fights are organized with the intention of recording them. Sometimes, the plan includes taking the other person by surprise and getting it on camera. Either way, the purpose behind it is to upload the videos onto the internet.
So why is this happening so much lately? Simple: people want hits. They want their videos to be seen, whether they’re the guy/girl winning the fight, the genius who managed to get the best shot of the action, or the oh-so supportive friend in the background yelling “F*** him up!”. The same way you’d freak out when you were a little kid if you ever caught a glimpse of yourself on TV when a news crew was at your school or something, people want to go on YouTube and find themselves to call their cousin over and be like, “Hey, Juan, look at this fight, there I am by the trash can!”. Everyone wants their 15 seconds of fame. And of course, it’s the most satisfying to the person who won the fight to know there’s a video out there with humiliating proof for the losers that they, well, lost.
The thing is, they are getting their hits. It’s gotten to the point where fighting has practically become as much a part of YouTube as celebrity vlogs and music videos are. It’s not just people posting the videos for their own enjoyment; thousands of people see the “entertainment value” in it and watch every day; they’ll type in a search for “funny fight”, click the first video that comes up, no matter how stupid it is, and for some reason watch all ten minute of that crap.
It’s one thing when two friends are messing around, like when you fight with your siblings. It’s an entirely different thing when two girls start cussing each other out in class, when all of a sudden they start slapping each other, and in a matter of seconds turns into a full-on fight. Rather than do anything about it, the first instinct of the people around is to whip out their phones and set them to video. That’s just ridiculous. Then there’s the real violence, the kind of video where you see a guy getting jumped, getting hit by a chair or a beer bottle or something, something that results in bleeding or serious injury. How can you record that, or even watch that for your own amusement? That’s just sick; it really is.
The point I want to get to is this: Why? I mean, what’s the point? First of all, why would you want to be recorded fighting? You’d think people would be embarrassed rather than proud, because really, even if you “win”, people aren’t going to think you’re awesome; they’re going to laugh at and ridicule you, not to mention the fact that you can get into some serious trouble if the right people see it. There’s really no point in recording the fight either, especially because if [school administrators] see it (as they’re starting to do) you’ll get in trouble along with the people you’re recording. And why waste your time watching those videos? “Because, it’s funny”? Seriously, if that’s the funniest thing you can find, your sense of humor sucks.
Think about it: every minute, 15 hours of video is uploaded onto YouTube alone. Fights are such a waste.