In other words: how Google knows where I was in the first week of June is because of people like me, who upload or back up our pictures onto the company’s servers. Letting the company play with the content they are storing for us is a sometimes tacit, sometimes explicit part of the transaction. Furthermore – time-saving convenience being the wonderful thing that it is – many, if not most, people are happy with the features that are added from time to time, which they hadn’t known they even needed. Like Auto Awesome, to which Stories is the latest addiction. One of the features of Auto Awesome can take several near-identical pictures in your collection and select the best pose and the best smile in order to produce an automated composite which just so happens to capture a moment that never existed. But who cares? It is a beautiful picture, and you’re in it.

‘Memories made easier’ is an attractive proposition. We’re talking strictly about social memory, here. This is what stories are about: sharing in our experiences and interests, so that others may know us better. But this is also how we construct our identity, socially, and has been since long before these new technologies.

I’ve been reading Giovanni Tiso’s blog for a while, and it’s not like every post is gold - Italian post-communist takes on New Zealand politics can get a little esoteric for even me - but he’s one of the more rewarding writers I follow.