Why the title PR... is it an allusion o the patern of the footage, or is it an allusion to Cayce's, how should we say, coolness Recognition Powers. Why or what is Patern Recognition?

All of the above?

Hello and Good question. Why Pattern Recognition? Colin covered it directly. My thoughts (and I have no authority to speak for WG or anyone else on this board) indirectly are that the human trait of pattern recognition is a recurring theme for WG. In several of his books, he has touched on many uses of pattern recognition from computer modeling of human behavior to predicting human behavior and predicting the future. _Pattern Recognition_ seems to go into much more depth in the realm of the errors of the human trait. He mentions the constant struggle to control the paranoia caused by the trait and the inherent errors in association caused by miscorrelation of events. Don’t rule out coincidence. Even in recent blogs he’s hit on the one of the must destructive results of association (pattern recognition) error, racism.

Maybe Gibson just thought it sounded cool?

All of the above, adding the different searches going on, from Cayce and her father, to Cayce to the footage maker, that use also different brands of PR.

And the constant fight against apophenia, and the fear of falling into it.

Many of these themes were presented in the Bridge, but here they are explored at a human instead of a supra-human level.

There's a very long answer to this - here is the headline version.
Human beings like to think that their lives have meanings (ie patterns).Belief systems, including religion, provide these patterns, such that things you see and experience can be put into a coherent whole. The end of religion or ideology doesn't take away this urge, it's just fulfilled in other ways. In PR, marketing has replaced religion and politics as a generator of patterns - brands, in effect, have bcome the new icons. This is most obvious in the London scenes, where the discussions about branding largely take place. Tokyo is a different type of situation - a land where traditional patterns (both visual and social) have largely continued to exist, but are hard for foreigners to penetrate. (What Barthes called the Empire of Signs). And Russia is a place where the patterns of Communist ideology and even of Russian traditional culture have been pushed aside in a new world of Mafia capitalism where nothing makes sense and there are no patterns to recognise anyway. The footage (like Cayce's mother's belief in EVP) represents the urge to find (or even impose) a pattern on events which are basically anarchic.
Something like that, anyway.

And just so I don't appear to be totally unsympathetic, there are far more possible instances of pattern recognition in the book than the ones mentioned so far. It runs through the book, both in major themes (as in agent2508's post) and in simpler examples:

• Cayce's mother's obsession with finding hidden voices (patterns) in blank audio tapes.
  
• Cayce's ability to recognize the pattern of 'cool' unconsciously (as already mentioned)
  
• The speech by Bigend in chapter six, ending "For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents' have insufficient 'now' to stand on. ... We have no future ... We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition."
  
• "The lighters in the photographs are so worn, so dented and sweat corroded, that Cayce may well be the first diner to ever have deciphered these actual texts."
  
• Digging out the pattern of the watermarks in the footage.
  
• The tool used to look for the T-shape. A pattern recognition machine.
  
• Boone Chu appearing on the street before Cayce meets him. Random, or was Boone following her? Is there a pattern?
  
• Similarly with Billy Prion appearing on the plane to Tokyo after Cayce noticed him in the bar. Is he also part of some conspriacy?
  
• And on and on...
  

But i feel as though WG is trying to express something deeper than just coincidental pattern. Although i hadn't noticed how much pattern there is in even the smallest asspects of PR. Although there are MANY different implications to pattern, i personnaly would like to know if there is a major theme the derives from "pattern recognition" itself.

PS: Amazing work detecting all the forms of pattern i didn't know there was so many.

Well, if you want my take on the author's intentions regarding pattern recognition I think that he was not so much trying to make a statement as raise a question. We humans are so good at pattern recognition that we see patterns that aren't there, or might not be there. But how do we decide whether our pattern recognition is serving us, or whether it is faulty?

What's really interesting about this topic is that there is no real answer to questions about which patterns are described in a work of art. This is because such a work has to have its own patterns to give it a structure of any kind (real life, without patterns, is a kind of chaos.) So PR is a book about (as Colin says) the search for patterns, yet it is also a carefully constructed (ie patterned) story in which readers, like Cayce and the other characters, find their own patterns. It's very hard to say whether particular patterns "are" or "are not" present in a work of art : the author is often not the most reliable of guides. The issue, of course, is whether patterns in the story are coincidental or not, and that's an issue to do with psychology rather than literature. A great deal of modern culture at the moment is devoted to finding patterns in life and history which are not there - a kind of applied paranoia. PR itself is partly about this.

Very interesting, the possiblity of WG wanting to express that " We humans are so good at pattern recognition that we see patterns that aren't there, or might not be there." seems very logical. But what keeps me wondering is what did WG want to express through cayce's coolness detection "powers". I feel as though it is linked with pattern recognition. what seems celar to me is that Cayce's ability is deffinatley real, she doesn't seem to spot make belief patterns. But what patterns are real and which ones are fake.

Yes, Cayce's ability does seem to be real, or at least it is real enough for ad agencies to pay her for it. Her ability is, in a sense, seeing a hidden pattern: the common features which make a logo or image appealing, which most people do not recognize immediately, even though they are affected by those features.

You could also take it as another look at the old line about even paranoid people having enemies: just because something looks like magic, doesn't mean it won't work.

What was the drug that Dorotea slipped Cayce? I can't remember. I think a hypnotic of some kind but not Rohypnol like Parkaboy suspected. It was something else. And while it was Dorotea's job to bring Cayce to Dreamland prison, I think Dorotea had her own agenda. Taking Cayce's 'powers' away with the drug was a blessing for both of them. (Dorotea: Angel or Devil: depends on how you look at it.)

Cayce's powers are very localised, and she's actually no more perceptive than the next person about interpreting life as a whole - eg thinking she's in a prison when the fence is to keep people out rather than in. She also consistently misreads signifiers in Japan (to be fair, not difficult for a gaijin.) Her's is a kind of degenerate skill, not trying to understand the universe but simply allowing companies to market their goods more effectively.

you bring up good points and I think they are valid and P.R. applies to the idea that she was searching for a watermark in the footage. Cayce being a marketing wiz would be able to trace the watermark nack to the creator of the footage.

you wrote:
Why the title PR... is it an allusion o the patern of the footage, or is it an allusion to Cayce's, how should we say, coolness Recognition Powers. Why or what is Patern Recognition?

There's a cultural aspect that may have been an influence. This book was written and published during the period when informatics has exploded from an emergent technique to become a dominant form of observation and analysis.

I just reread PR last week (actually, just after I read Idoru again as well), and I have a whole new take on the 'reason' that PR is called PR (not the least of which that Gibson mentions PR in Idoru...) but my new take is long and convoluted and will require an hour or so to write it out... it may involve itself in the creation of a new thread, so stay tuned!

Vecna's back. Regale us with your drunken political commentary.

Most of the points made so far make good sense to me.

Not related directly to the novel, a ditty about pattern comes to mind. The desk holding up my computer appears to be made of wood. Wood is a pattern of molecules made of a pattern of carbon atoms made of a pattern of subatomic particles. There is only pattern.

Can’t recall where I read/heard that and just wanted to toss it in.

quote:

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Originally posted by lithos:
Vecna's back. Regale us with your drunken political commentary.

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NO! Must... stay... away... from... politics.

It makes me so angry. How 'bout I just get drunk and then post what I *really* think about Pattern Recognition? Then everyone, including the MAN HIMSELF, will hate me