Student hit hard by his Web 'fame'

"Think before you upload" would be a massive understatement for Yale University senior and job applicant Aleksey Vayner. He didn't even upload his resume video and 11-page cover letter and resume for Swiss bank USB to YouTube – other people did the circulating and blogging about them. They "showed up on two blogs, and then quickly spread on the Internet," the New York Times reports. The video, entitled "Impossible is Nothing" and "staged to look like a job interview, is spliced with shots of Mr. Vayner lifting weights and ballroom dancing and has him spouting Zen-like inspirational messages. The video clip flooded e-mail inboxes across Wall Street and eventually appeared on the video-sharing site YouTube," according to the Times. The Daily Princetonian reports that he has "successfully petitioned YouTube to remove his video, but it's still at IvyGateblog.com, which the Princeton University paper says Vayner has "threatened to sue." But now the student, who has taken a short leave from Yale but plans to take his midterms, the Times reports, is "facing charges himself," according to the Daily Princetonian, for claiming to have launched a nonprofit organization that Charity Navigator, an evaluator of US charities, says doesn't exist. He has also been accused of plagiarism in a self-published book he includes in his resume. Certainly this story, "comic" for so many Net users but also tragic, is about a number of things, not least of which how the Internet turns up the volume on and perpetuates what people upload to it. What's hard for any parent to see is how the stories from which everybody can draw lessons seem to be getting harsher. The observer affects the experiment here too, it seems – as more and more people are party to people's messages on the participatory Web, the messages potentially harm their senders more.