I have recently distributed all the twitter accounts I follow across four lists. I follow eighty something twitter accounts and from time to time, getting through the timeline is a bit of a bother. So I decided to weigh, sort and categorize everyone.
Of course, such a thing is not to be done lightly. I pondered and schemed and finally decided to follow the Rumsfeld doctrine. Or a variation of it at least.
I have a couple of public lists containing tech and digital humanities stuff, but then I have three additional lists based on a famous statement about the search for weapons of mass destruction 1 in Iraq given by former secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. There are Known unknowns, Unknown knowns and unknown unknowns.
As Zizek rightly pointed out, Rumsfeld never referred to the category of unknown knowns 2. He did however talk of Known knowns. What Zizek found amusing was the fact that Rumsfeld tried to evoke the terror of the unknown threats that we can’t even imagine – the unknown unknowns – without even considering taking a look at the disavowed ideological background for his statements.
I am not completely faithful to the Rumsfeld doctrine as he imagined it. The known unknowns within my Twitter universe are not the ever elusive dangers I know about but am unable to confront and terminate. They are not the objet petit a. Nor are they people I know who are not famous. The list contains people that I know – friends and acquaintances – but it acknowledges that they will remain forever ‘other’, you can never fully know the people you know.
The unknown knowns are the almost famous people that I do know, but not quite. More specifically they are the people that I do not know personally, which is exactly why I know them. I know them in their spectacular presence, their imaginary existence as whole consistent entities, I know them as being one with their name and character.
Unknown unknowns lists the information that I didn’t know that I didn’t know, i.e. news. Different news services inform me on a daily basis of things I had no idea would happen or the existence of which I had never guessed. The terror of Rumsfeld is transformed into the pleasant pursuit of learning.
Just as Rumsfeld left out one of the four possible combinations of the two terms known and unknown, I have left out the known knowns. Because who on earth would follow a stream of data you are already familiar with?
I am very happy with my modified Rumsfeld doctrine. I hereby present it to public use.
- when writing this, I actually wrote weapons of mass distraction. Talk about a Freudian free fall ↩
- Cf. e.g. http://www.lacan.com/zizekrumsfeld.htm ↩
