03 November 2015

The Positives of YouTube Brawl Videos


There's a guilty pleasure in watching a brawl on YouTube. Maybe there is something inherent in us humans to pay close attention to conflict.

Nowadays, whenever there is a brawl, people take out their smartphones and start recording, and at first I thought this was a sign that people were so keen to put up videos or pictures on their Facebook or Twitter feeds that they forget to actually do something to stop the fight. However, people suddenly filming brawls may actually be a good thing.

In the old days, fights were like rapes in that it was one person's word against another. Now because many fights are filmed with smartphones, it helps the police and maybe even judges in a courtroom. The cop who recently shot a black man in the back probably would have gotten away with it were it not for him being filmed (not via a smartphone). He is now indicted for murder.

With wearables technology such as Google Glass and the Narrative Clip allowing people to record anything at all times, privacy may be a thing of the past. We must assume that there will always be a camera on us. This can be seen as a negative, but it may also be seen as a positive. It means we will all be accountable for our actions because what we do will be watched by the world. Whether the world will judge us fairly is another issue.

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