Life-logging provides an effective way to produce superior, smarter time capsules that could make our future memories of the past richer and more multilayered. Few of us would take the effort to devise such time capsules for all events in our lives. Besides, the importance we attach to such events changes over time but life-logging could do this automatically, revolutionizing how we reminisce. Appreciating these virtues, however, requires that we understand the value of memory. And a second large problem with Delete is that Mayer-Schoenberger makes no room for the positive and therapeutic role that remembering and especially reminiscence play in our lives. As a result, he does not see how technology could actually augment our memories without driving us insane.

Some of the recent pieces I’ve published:

Battling the Cyber Warmongers, Wall Street Journal

Think Again: The Internet, Foreign Policy

Debate with Clay Shirky over at Edge.org (also published in German by Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung)

In case you are not on my mailing list (let me know if you would like to be added by email!) or don’t follow me on Twitter, you may have missed the following pieces/media appearances since January:

The Digital Dictatorship, Wall Street Journal

Techno Rebellion (review of Jaron Lanier’s You Are Not a Gadget), The National

E-outed (review of Helen Nissenbaum’s Privacy in Context), Times Literary Supplement

The net generation, unplugged, The Economist

+Vorsicht, Freund hört mit!, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (this is a German translation of my earlier Prospect article)

Other major media:

The Forum, BBC

The World Today, BBC (iPlayer link)

Digital Giants series, BBC

Kojo Namdi show, WAMU

The Agenda, TVO

There were also a few nice articles featuring my work in the Financial Times and the New York Times.

…It seemed like a neoconservative dream come true: hordes of brave green-clad young Iranians breaking through the firewalls of the deranged ayatollahs, all with the help of an American start-up, run by thirtysomething Californians on generous handouts from venture capitalists. Who needs diplomacy when we’ve got Twitter? That it was mostly foreigners tweet-touting the revolution, that popular Iranian sites such as Balatarin played a much more important role locally, that the Iranian authorities were trolling Twitter to gather intelligence about the protesters  -  all of that was lost on western commentators who took the events in Iran to be the ultimate proof that the digital revolution was upon us (“This is it. The big one,” the web guru Clay Shirky proclaimed in an interview with TED.com). It wasn’t long before Gordon Brown suggested that “another Rwanda” would be impossible in the age of Twitter.

Fake clips, usually made to provoke and split the opposition, are becoming a staple of the Iranian Internet. One such video, which portrayed someone burning a poster of the country’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei before a crowd of cheering people, circulated on foreign and Iranian Web sites in early December.

Luckily, closer examination by Iranian and foreign bloggers showed that it was probably a skillful montage. But can thousands of similar videos be fact-checked as thoroughly?

We shouldn’t kid ourselves. Nobody knows how to create sustainable digital public spheres capable of promoting democracy. Western interventions can even thwart the natural development of such spaces. Governments usually give cash to a favoured NGOoften based outside the authoritarian state in question—which has the job of creating new social media infrastructure: group blogs, social networks, search engines and other services that we take for granted in the west. The NGOs then hire local talent to work on a Belarusian Twitter or an Egyptian version of the blog-search platform Technorati.

Britain’s incoming government would be well advised to purge all starry-eyed cyber-utopians – like Gordon Brown’s “social media guru” – from its roster of advisers. The best riposte to Brown’s now infamous proclamation that “You cannot have Rwanda again because information would come out far more quickly about what is actually going on and the public opinion would grow to the point where action would need to be taken” came from the always-snarky tech site, The Register: “We’d like to see him try Twittering that to people in Sudan, or Northern Sri Lanka, or Somalia.” How about Iraq?