|
Wow! Well done! Oddly, my DDG search for "When you give people too much information, they instantly resort to pattern recognition" only found 6 Tweets and one web page with just the quote and no citation. Interesting how the quotes I found are different than the transcript, which says: "When you give people too much information, they instantly resort to pattern recognition – in other words, to structuring the experience. And I think this is part of the artist’s world." You can also see how his comments in 1968 follow the same theme from his book, with "there is in IBM, for example, a phrase that information overload produces pattern recognition." And, fundamentally, McLuhan appears to be saying that pattern matching is a good thing. "The artist, when he encounters the present, the contemporary artist, is always seeking new patterns, new pattern recognition, which is his task, for heaven’s sake. ... The scientists are going to wake up to this shortly and will be resorting en masse to the artist’s studio in order to discover the forms of the materials they’re dealing with." That's just about the opposite of how this linked-to essay interprets the phrase. |