by Jeremy Matthews

Created on: July 21, 2008

Online prank videos are becoming more popular with today's youth. In all regards, it isn't so much as the video that is bad. It is the severity of the prank itself. Pranks can be either funny or extremely malicious. If you look at television shows such as 'Candid Camera' or 'America's Funniest Home Videos'; both shows freely air bloopers, pranks, and accidents to a massive viewing audience. However, these differ a lot from the malicious pranks that are popping up all over YouTube, Facebook, and Myspace.

A few weeks ago, I was watching one of the news programs and they were covering a story about a couple of kids that had pulled a 'Fire in the hole' prank on a drive-thru worker. I caught the story towards the end of the coverage, so I thought I'd look it up. So I jumped online and surfed around the web for only a couple of minutes before I found out what a 'fire in the hole' prank is. Apparently, you are supposed to throw a drink at the person working the drive-thru and yell 'Fire in the hole!'. In my opinion, not very funny. Why? Because someone could easily get hurt. Pranks cross the line at bodily harm.

What happened to the victim? Well, the boys who played this prank filmed it and then uploaded it to YouTube. Once it was online, millions of people clicked through and viewed it. Eventually, according to the interview, some customer's visited the restaurant and recognized her from the YouTube video. So not only did she suffer the embarrassment from the prank when it occured, but again when local people recognized her from an internationally viewed website.

Long story short, last mentioned she was pressing charges, and the boys had issued apology statements. In my opinion, that was just a slap on the hand. And it sends the message to other people that there will be no serious recourse from this type of action. Of course some blame has too be placed with the hosting sites as well. In the interview mentioned above, it was stated that there were huge numbers of people viewing the video from this 'prank'. YouTube had followed up with a statement that they do monitor videos that are posted; but they can't monitor all of the videos. I completely understand their point; however, I find it hard to believe that a site that basically charters out it's bandwidth for user submitted video clips, couldn't see large amounts of bandwidth going to the most viewed clips. And in this case I think that maybe they should step back and evaluate a more effective screening process.

With the advent and wide popularity of the Web 2.0, we are going to see more and more things like this showing up all over the web. Why? The Web 2.0 is primarily focused towards user created content. If you have a gripe of complaint, post a YouTube clip or it or blog about it on your Myspace page. And with this freedom to publish and post whatever you like, there will be plenty of posts that people disagree with. These pranks are just the beginning of a new age in bullying.

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