Everybody's Watching
As the 13th most popular site on the Internet, with people watching
more than 100 million of its videos everyday,
YouTube is taking the
web by storm.
. Photograph by Darren Braun.
On an evening in late April of this year, a Kowloon Motor
Bus was going along route 68X toward Hong Kong's Yuen Long
District. Property agent Elvis Ho Yui Hei shifted in his seat. He
was trapped in a situation familiar to all of us, sitting one row
behind an older man talking very loudly on a cell phone. The
23-year-old tapped the gentleman on the shoulder, addressed him
with the respectful term "Uncle," and asked him to please speak
more softly. And that's how it all began.
The older man suddenly leaned over his seat and shouted at Ho,
unleashing a stream of verbal abuse, both harrowing and hilarious.
For six long minutes, the quarrel continued, Ho mostly silent as
the older man ranted on, demanding an apology, explaining how his
life is very stressful, and spewing profanities about Ho's
mother.
We've all been privy to a moment like this at one time or another -
a rare window of real life that you might see and tell your friends
about afterward; another little anecdote from the daily pageant of
human beings trying to share space on the planet. However, this
particular moment was recorded on video by a resourceful
accountant/student named Jon Fong Wing Hang, who, sitting across
the aisle from Ho, happened to have a cell-phone camera.
The video segment was then uploaded to a Hong Kong Internet forum
and quickly reposted to YouTube, an online repository of digital
videos that's based in
California. Within a month, the segment,
known as "Bus Uncle," became one of YouTube's most popular clips: a
slice of real life on a bus, seen and enjoyed by millions of
viewers.