A Montenegrin man living in Staten Island, New York announced this week that he's suing Facebook for half-a-million dollars because the social-networking site disabled his account. The only thing the man wants (aside from the five-hundred-thousand dollars) is to be reconnected with his three-hundred-and-forty "friends" and his lost archive of uploaded photographs.The Internet has laid everything in the palm of our collective hands: Our family and friends, our enemies and our admirers, histories, biographies, diaries of the famous and the infamous, answers to questions that we've had and answers to questions that we never dreamed of ever asking, digitized glossy centerfolds of Marilyn Monroe in the first issue of
Playboy magazine and cell phone pictures of our ex-girlfriends last weekend, juggling monkeys and beer-guzzling pot-belly pigs and Super Bowls and Olympic competitions archived in one-minute video recaps on Yahoo's sports page, Hotmail, Gmail, Hushmail, Zoho Mail, AIM Mail, FastMail –
YOU'VE GOT MAIL!Roll over Gutenberg.It's been speculated that before the Big Bang, all of the matter in the universe was compressed to less than the size of a golf ball. Will the compact expansiveness of the Internet experience its own Big Bang? Surely, at some point a nasty bug or virus of some kind will crash the whole works – slice the World Wide Web to shreds like a great white caught in some fisherman's net – likely conceived and executed by a fourteen-year-old kid on a laptop computer in Malaysia or Des Moines. And a thousand years from now, historians and archeologists will puzzle over this gap in human history, this early apex in the history of modern man that left no record of its existence. Our Dark Age.
Published on January 28, 2011 21:21
A Montenegrin man living in Staten Island, New York announced this week that he's suing Facebook for half-a-million dollars because the social-networking site disabled his account. The only thing the man wants (aside from the five-hundred-thousand dollars) is to be reconnected with his three-hundred-and-forty "friends" and his lost archive of uploaded photographs.The Internet has laid everything in the palm of our collective hands: Our family and friends, our enemies and our admirers, histories, biographies, diaries of the famous and the infamous, answers to questions that we've had and answers to questions that we never dreamed of ever asking, digitized glossy centerfolds of Marilyn Monroe in the first issue of Playboy magazine and cell phone pictures of our ex-girlfriends last weekend, juggling monkeys and beer-guzzling pot-belly pigs and Super Bowls and Olympic competitions archived in one-minute video recaps on Yahoo's sports page, Hotmail, Gmail, Hushmail, Zoho Mail, AIM Mail, FastMail – YOU'VE GOT MAIL!Roll over Gutenberg.It's been speculated that before the Big Bang, all of the matter in the universe was compressed to less than the size of a golf ball. Will the compact expansiveness of the Internet experience its own Big Bang? Surely, at some point a nasty bug or virus of some kind will crash the whole works – slice the World Wide Web to shreds like a great white caught in some fisherman's net – likely conceived and executed by a fourteen-year-old kid on a laptop computer in Malaysia or Des Moines. And a thousand years from now, historians and archeologists will puzzle over this gap in human history, this early apex in the history of modern man that left no record of its existence. Our Dark Age.
