Certification - July 2008 - (Page 26)

Divorce on YouTube Another recent, high-profile news story with YouTube at its center is that of Tricia Walsh-Smith, a former actress and playwright in New York City in the midst of a divorce battle with her husband, Philip Smith, president of The Shubert Organization, the largest theater owner on Broadway. In an attempt to gain the upper hand, Walsh-Smith took to YouTube to social media: an accessible way to instantly smear another party. “What’s interesting to me is that she would have done this via YouTube rather than her own Web site,” Jones said. “YouTube has made it so easy to post these kinds of things that why would you go to the lengths of putting [up] your own Web site when you can easily upload it to YouTube?” Perrin said he couldn’t think of any other medium throughout history that would have been so immediate in its effect. “The self-production aspect of YouTube, combined with its broadcast reach, that is a unique form,” he said. “I’m sure there are lots of estranged spouses throughout history who would like the opportunity to have done that. YouTube provides us a space in which people can post stuff without the gatekeepers that have been associated with previous high-bandwidth media.” In debating the level of causality one can attribute to YouTube, Perrin draws a comparison with what was once a newly emergent communication tool: the telephone. “If you go back and look at some of the really fine social history of what people were worried about in terms of the advent of the telephone, we hear a lot of the same stuff,” he said. The fear was that people would be “driven to do crazy and racy things because they’re allowed and able now to tell people about it quickly through the telephone.” Walsh-Smith’s clip, meanwhile, provides an interesting study on the difference between using the telephone to smear someone and using online video to do so. In the video, she actually calls her husband, reaching him very briefly before being thrown to his secretary, telling her, “I’m filming at the moment; we’re doing a little video for YouTube.” She then repeats her humiliating claims about their sex life. Walsh-Smith’s husband’s secretary is decidedly nonplussed. Whereas in the past the prank call itself would have been humiliation enough, now the main act is the video documentation of that call and the decision to broadcast it around the world. A decision, Brown pointed out, that may have been made hastily and then magnified by the site. “The A Marriage Exposed In the midst of a divorce battle with her husband, Tricia Walsh-Smith took to YouTube to expose details of her marriage. expose details of her marriage and its subsequent, apparently acrimonious split. The clip begins with Walsh-Smith in her kitchen discussing particulars of her prenuptial agreement and why she may or may not be getting evicted from her Park Avenue apartment, calling herself an idiot and giving herself a tarot-card reading before declaring, “I’m fighting back, and I’m going to do this video and I’ll put it up on YouTube.” She then makes embarrassing claims regarding the couple’s sex life and later goes through their wedding album on camera, describing family members as “bad” or “evil.” In this instance, YouTube presented a scorned woman with a unique opportunity in the history of 26 CERTIFICATION MAGAZINE July 2008 http://www.shubertorganization.com/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQ5tM5Y35LM

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Certification - July 2008

Certification - July 2008 Editor's Letter Contents Data System Virtual Village Tech Careers Dear Techie Academic Connection Look Ahead Troubleshooting Testing Your Foot in the Door: Certification at the Entry Level Analyzing the Societal Effects of YouTube Interface Spread the Knowledge: Becoming an IT Trainer Inside Certification Ad Index What We Like Endtag

Certification - July 2008

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