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Thursday, September 17, 2009
Law - "College Stars Run for Cover From Fans’ Cameras "
This story in the NY Times today, reported by Pete Thamel and Thayer Evans, begins:
While shopping recently at RadioShack, Florida quarterback Tim Tebow was approached by a woman with a seemingly innocuous request to take a picture with him. But an instant before her mother snapped the photo with a cellphone camera, the woman tried to take off her shirt.“It’s happened four or five times,” Tebow said with a sigh. “Most of the time I just dive out of the picture. Some people can just be crazy.”
In the era of Twitter, Facebook and Deadspin.com, being the big man on campus no longer means being the life of the party. For all the images of marching bands, cheerleaders and raucous student fans associated with college football, the romantic notion of a quaint campus life for star quarterbacks like Tebow, Oklahoma’s Sam Bradford and Texas’ Colt McCoy has all but disappeared, killed off by a combination of cloying fans and new technology.
Athletic departments now monitor social networking Web sites, and cellphones are collected at the door of college parties to try to keep embarrassing or illegal moments off the Internet.
“The latest stuff with the cellphones and digital devices has erased the boundaries between public and private,” Michael Oriard, an Oregon State professor who has written three books about the culture of college football, said in a telephone interview. “It’s an enormous jump, as it’s not just ESPN or Fox cameras, but it’s everyone with a cellphone.”
Posted by Marcia Oddi on September 17, 2009 01:14 PM
Posted to General Law Related