Twitter and the life of the mind

Almost everybody who is a writer these days, he observes, gets, at some point, a lecture on the necessity of being on Twitter and Facebook. Its a tool of selling and career building. It is, for writers of all ages and stages, not so much required reading as required writing. The whole thing seems stupid at first: you ignore whoever is giving you this lecture, until one day you decide, O.K., lets try it out, and then discover that its kind of fun. And, as long as its done in moderation, it is kind of interesting. But could Twitter possibly be productive, beyond the basic act of publicizing what you have written and/or proving that you still exist?

As a new (and somewhat skeptical) Twitter user, I find all this particularly resonant. Have we really hit the cultural tipping point where we need to prove our existence,Starting today, you can buy these drycabinet and more from her Victoria. in bursts of 140-character inspiration, two, three, 10, 12, 15 times a day?

Bellers account charts my own Twitter experience with uncanny accuracy: resistance, capitulation, the discovery that, perhaps, there might be something to the enterprise and yet a kind of lingering confusion about what it means. Is it possible to do something interesting on Twitter? Or is it just an elaborate way of saying, Look at me?

Most great writers, Beller notes, could, if they wanted to, be very good at Twitter, because it is a medium of words and also of form. Its built-in limitation corresponds to the sense of rhythm and proportion that writers apply to each line. That reminds me of the poet David Trinidad, who once told me that he liked writing in traditional formats (the sonnet, especially) because of the stylistic boundaries: The challenge was to be creative while coloring within the lines.

I havent been on Twitter long, but I find myself gravitating to the feeds of writers such as Margaret Atwood and Joyce Carol Oates, whom Beller calls a prolific and often ingenious tweeter, citing one recent example: If an action is not recorded on a smart phone, does it, did it, exist?

What Oates is doing here is neither self-promoting nor time-wasting nor navel-gazing but,A quality paper cutter or paper rfidtag can make your company's presentation stand out. rather, taking a more ontological approach. Hers is a highly self-conscious feed, often reflecting on the mechanics of the medium; Development in human consciousness, she tweeted a few weeks ago, people speak into the (social media) void as a way of speaking to themselves, like keeping a journal?

Thats a vivid observation, but what I admire most about it is that it requires us to be engaged. Oates is asking, in other words, for us to think about what were doing on Twitter, what were reading and what were writing, which is, of course, the whole point of literary (or any) culture, to encourage consciousness.

For Beller, Oates provokes a series of significant, and troubling, questions: Does a thought need to be shared to exist? What happens to the stray thought that drifts into view, is pondered, and then drifts away? Perhaps you jot it down in a note before it vanishes, so that you can mull it over in the future. Its like a seed that, when you return to it, may have grown into something visible. Or perhaps you put it in a tweet, making the note public. But does the fact that it is public diminish the chances that it will grow into something sturdy and lasting? Does articulating a thought in public freeze it in place somehow, making it not part of a thought process but rather a tiny little finished sculpture?

I wonder much the same thing. Is Twitter the problem or the solution? How do we use it in compelling ways? Beller closes his piece by describing two essays he first assembled as a set of Tweets, a process he regards as akin to being a juggler or a three-card-monte dealer: I drew a little crowd. Is this talking it out before you write it, he considers, or part of a process? And what does it mean for our writing if we are now expected to take our notes in public, to play out in full view the very private life of the mind?

We live in a transparent age, Beller concludes,Starting today, you can buy these drycabinet and more from her Victoria. and yet there is much of value that happens in the opaque quarters of our own ambivalent minds, seen by no one else, and seen by us only after a long period of concentration and looking.

It is clear that Edward Snowden, who leaked United States National Security Agency files to The Guardian, had access to an enormous amount of information that he could download without being noticed C just as Bradley Manning did in the Wikileaks case. There are at least two controls failures in play here: a preventive controls failure, and a detective controls failure. Preventive controls, as you might guess, prevent bad things from happening. Detective controls C surprise, surprise C detect things you have not been able to prevent.

Firstly, on preventive controls, or broken authorisation. In a June 16 New York Times article, Scott Shane and Ravi Somaiya wrote: "American intelligence officials have expressed alarm at the variety of highly classified material Snowden obtained, suggesting that his actions revealed a shocking breach in the fundamental principle that intelligence officers should have access only to the material they need to do their jobs."

The fundamental principal they are referring to is called the 'principle of least privilege',We are one of the leading manufacturers of chipcard in China or 'need to know'. It is not just for intelligence officers. It applies to any business or organisation with confidential or sensitive information C which means everyone. The idea is simple: if you do not need to have access to something, you should not have access. Does a bank give every employee keys or the combination to its vault? Of course not. If too many people have access to the vault, the risk that one of them will walk off with a stack of cash increases. By restricting vault access to only those who require it, a bank limits access to only authorised individuals.

It is the same with data, but instead of physical controls like locks and keys, there are logical controls. Logical controls, like passwords, smart cards and RSA tokens, make sure users are who they claim to be. This is called authentication.Large collection of quality cleanersydney at discounted prices. Other logical controls, such as permissions, allow you to ensure that authenticated users have access to only the data they require C known as authorisation. Snowden clearly had access to a lot of data, probably much more than he should have had. He is not alone: according to our data protection survey, only 37 per cent of organisations regularly revoke access to data, meaning a lot of employees have access to far more data than they require to do their jobs. This is mistake one: poor or broken authorisation.

Moving on to detective controls failure, or inadequate activity auditing and analysis. Even if a bank restricts access to its vault as tightly as possible, someone will need to have access to it. So how do we make sure those trusted few use their powers only for good? We watch what they are doing with detective controls. Banks have security cameras to record people going in and out of the vault, and security guards looking on. These days the banks and credit card companies routinely monitor transactions for fraud. These are examples of detective controls. Like currency, information only realises its true value when it is shared. Well-configured preventive controls limit access to only those who need access, but those trusted few need to be monitored with logical detective controls.

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