Students post videos of schoolyard brawls

In schoolyards across the country, all it takes to attract a crowd are the words "Fight! Fight! Fight!" But students are increasingly showing up with cameras to record the brawls, then posting the footage on the Internet. Some of the videos have been viewed more than a million times. Now school officials and cyberspace watchdogs are worried that the videos will encourage violence and sharpen the humiliation of defeat for the losers.

"Kids are looking for their 15 megabytes of fame," said Parry Aftab, executive director of the Internet safety group WiredSafety.org. "Kids' popularity is measured by how many hits they get, how many people visit their sites."

Not all of the fights are spontaneous or motivated strictly by animosity. Some are planned ahead of time by combatants who arrange for their own brawling to be recorded. Scores of bare-knuckled fights appear on YouTube or on sites devoted entirely to the grainy and shaky amateur recordings, which are usually made with cell phones or digital cameras.

In one recent video, two girls are egged on by friends and soon begin punching and choking one another. In other videos, a boy appears to be knocked unconscious by a well-placed haymaker, and a second boy spits out blood after suffering a blow to the mouth.

"One of the reasons for doing this is to attract attention," said Nancy Willard, executive director of the Oregon-based Center for Safe and Responsible Internet Use. "The more vicious the fight, the greater the attention."

On YouTube, viewers rate the action by brutality level and sometimes make profanity-laced observations.