In this instance, I refer to black hole, not in the sense of an empty place where things disappear, but in terms of the genuine astrophysical phenomenon of the black hole….

A place that sucks everything in with such speed that it warps time and space… and as matter reaches increasing speeds, approaching speed of light… every subatomic particle gets pulled and stretched beyond all recognition. Until the only thing that’s left is an infinitely massive object in space… filled with tiny pieces of all it has consumed.

That kind of black hole… I was once ONE person, one personality, one entity in a non-virtual world. Then pieces of me were on Facebook… and Myspace… in several photo sites… and some more on LinkedIn… a bit into my customer newsletters… plus Plaxo… even more scattered in this blog… and as of last night… I sold my soul to Twitter.

And now, these little pieces of me have been sucked into cyberspace, intermingled and compressed with the other millions of social networkers and bloggers in this universe. I fear some pieces of me are to be abandoned in the ether, never to be reclaimed.

And so I wonder- is this it? Has the online world pulled us into a gazillion little pieces, never to be reunited… or will our web worlds collide some day, returning our pieces to a single mass and making us whole yet again…

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jj

Author, speaker, and recognized authority on network and wireless security architectures, Jennifer (JJ) Minella helps organizations solve technical problems and align teams.

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