Critic of digital era scoops German book award

An American critic of the digital age has been awarded a prestigious German book prize for his groundbreaking role in exploring the risks of today's Internet technologies, its organisers said Thursday.
Jaron Lanier, credited with coining the phrase "virtual reality", has scooped this year's Peace Prize of the German Publishers' and Booksellers' Association, at a time when the country is engaged in a heated debate about Internet security.
The prize, which carries a US $34,000 endowment, comes exactly a year after former CIA intelligence contractor Edward Snowden began revealing the vast scope of the US data dragnet, triggering privacy fears.
Data-sensitive Germans in particular reacted with outrage to the leaks.
Lanier's two books, which include last year's "Who Owns the Future?" have helped make the California-based 54-year-old "one of the most important critics of the digital world in our time", the association said in a statement, according to AFP.