Though the field is still new, conditions have never been better for this type of violence to flourish - the CDC estimates more than 80 percent of adolescents own either a cell phone, a PDA or a computer with Internet access.
From 2000 to 2005, the CDC reports a 50 percent increase in youths claiming to be victims of some form of online harassment.
Though the school rumble is a well-seasoned concept, as is the idea of staging fights in public spots so that the crowd can toast the winner and shame the loser, the technology is taking the toasting and shaming to new levels. "For perpetrators, [posting a beating online] allows them to show off to a wider audience, even people that they don't know," said Laurence Steinberg, a Temple University psychology professor. "It's boasting more widely."
Aftab calls it "kids' 15 megabytes of fame."
Online, young people feel freer, less inhibited with their language, their sexuality and their aggression, says Sheri Parks, a University of Maryland professor who teaches a class on American culture in the Information Age .
The Internet is where kids can let their hair down and build up their self-esteem - friend by virtual friend. If the video they post about a school beating is popular, they feel popular, Parks said.
"It's a way of mattering," she said. "For these kids, the stage is not the classroom or the playground; the stage is the Internet. That's where it is important to matter."
Aftab says some of the young people filming the beatings half-way believe that they're actors in a reality show, posing for the camera and angling for the right shot. She says she doesn't think they realize that it's reality, that their hands are bruising real skin or that it could land them in a real jail cell.
"Once the Internet and multimedia is involved, everyone's an actor, everyone's a star," she said.
Kids in Baltimore, like kids everywhere, know how and where to find the violent videos.
China White, 12, a seventh-grader at Winston Middle School, has watched a few of them.
"When you see it at first, it's funny," she said. "But then when you think about it, it's not funny. It's trifling."
She thinks that the more attention the videos get, the better the chance that other kids will want to make their own - consequences be damned.
"If I see it then I might be like, `I want to see if I can do it.' I know if I do it, I'll go to jail. But some people think it's cool."
