Smile! You're an Unwitting Net Star.

Newsweek, December, 2006 by Steven Levy

By now you've heard enough about Michael Richards's racist meltdown at a Los Angeles comedy club. Plenty has been said about the content of his outburst, but not as much on the speed and thoroughness with which the news spread. The enabler of this ubiquity was a combination of two related technologies: cheap, portable video recording and broadband Internet.

It's a one-two punch that will increasingly affect our public life--even for some people who aren't in public life to begin with. It's a new fact of life in the digital age: any time you step outside your door, the possibility exists that you may wind up an unwilling figure of shame and ridicule--if not in the "Borat" movie, then at least on YouTube. It's surprising how celebrities and politicians have been slow to grasp...