Editing Pattern Recognition (novel) (section)

=== Pattern recognition ===
{{Quote box|width=30%|align=right|quote=<div style="text-align:left;">Parkaboy says you should go to new footage as though you've seen no previous footage at all, thereby momentarily escaping the film or films you've been assembling with, consciously or unconsciously, since first exposure. Homo sapiens are about pattern recognition, he says. Both a gift and a trap.</div>
|source=[[Cayce Pollard]], ''Pattern Recognition'', pages 22–23.}}
The central idea of the novel, seen by [[Toby Litt]] of ''[[The Guardian]]'' as being "plainly stated", is that "Homo sapiens is about [[pattern recognition]]" and that this is "[b]oth a gift and a trap", with the trap being humankind's [[apophenia]], "the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated things".<ref name=Litt>{{cite news |first=Toby |last=Litt |author-link= Toby Litt |title=Back to the 80s |work=[[The Guardian]] |date=April 26, 2003 |url= http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,942915,00.html |access-date=2007-12-07 | location=London}}</ref><ref name=Lim>{{cite news|first=Dennis |last=Lim |title=How Soon Is Now? – William Gibson's Present Tense |publisher=[[The Village Voice]] |date=12 February 2003 |url=http://www.villagevoice.com/books/0307,lim,41823,10.html |access-date=2007-11-27 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20071209163515/http://www.villagevoice.com/books/0307%2Clim%2C41823%2C10.html |archive-date=9 December 2007 }}</ref> Followers of the seemingly random clips in the novel seek connections and meaningfulness in them, but are revealed to be connecting unrelated things,<!--IF THE WORD APOPHENIA APPEARS IN GIBSON, CITE PAGE, OTHERWISE PLEASE AVOID USING REVIEWER IDEAS AS BEING "REVEALED" IN THE TEXT. LET THE TEXT SPEAK FOR ITSELF, AND REVIEWERS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.--> as the clips are just edited surveillance camera footage.{{cn|date=April 2025}} Likewise, Cayce's mother turns to investigating [[electronic voice phenomenon|electronic voice phenomena]] after Cayce's father disappears.{{cn|date=April 2025}} Science fiction critic Thomas Wagner underscores the human propensity to [[pattern recognition|recognise patterns]] using a comparison between the film clips and Cayce's search for her father after the attacks:<blockquote>[T]he very [[randomness]] and ineffability of the clips flies in the face of our natural human tendency towards pattern recognition ... [T]he subculture that surrounds "following the footage" ... [is] an effective plot device for underscoring the novel's post-9/11 themes: to wit, the uncertainty of the fabric of day-to-day life people began to feel following that event … [We] as people don't like uncertainty, don't like knowing that there's something we can't comprehend. And if we can't fit something into an existing pattern, then by golly we'll come up with one.<ref name=Wagner>{{cite web |url= http://www.sfreviews.net/patternrec.html |title= Pattern Recognition |access-date= 2007-11-29 |first= Thomas M. |last= Wagner |year= 2003 |publisher= sfreviews.net|archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20071017102343/http://www.sfreviews.net/patternrec.html |archive-date = October 17, 2007|url-status=dead}}</ref></blockquote> Within the marketing world, Cayce is portrayed not as an outside rebel, but rather a paragon of the system. Inescapably within the system, she seeks an [[Epistemological realism|epistemological perspective]] to objectively interpret patterns.<ref name=Wagner/><ref name=Skeates>{{cite journal |last= Skeates |first= Richard |date=April 2004 |title = A Melancholy Future Poetic | journal=City | volume = 8 | issue = 1| pages=135–140}}</ref> The review of the novel in ''[[The Village Voice]]'' calls this search "a survival tactic within the context of no context—dowsing for meaning, and sometimes settling for the illusion of meaning".<ref name=Lim/>