In the "old days," (I find myself saying that a lot recently, and I'm usually talking about six or seven years ago), if you lost a roll of film, it might, at best, have 36 pictures on it, and no one would bother to spend the money to have them developed.
Losing your "roll of film" these days means misplacing a memory card the size of a postage stamp, with quite possibly hundreds of pictures on it. There is at least one person who has done this, and is now the subject of an entirely fictional online life, called I Found Some of Your Life.
The writing is pretty good, actually. And the fact that something like this is even possible demonstrates how much the world really has changed. Anyone can be a writer and publisher--anyone. Like the bloggers that broke the story on the CBS memos, it's a dramatic redistribution of power away from the "old" media conglomerates and toward a much more equitable and egalitarian model. Of course, it's also now easier to publish complete falsehoods, but as CBS found out, to its chagrin, if the falsehood is important in some way, someone, somewhere, will let the world know.