Pattern Recognition Brainstorm

In Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, we can see two floating motifs that set the center of the characters’ world – advertising and globalization.

Voytek’s sister, Magda, is involved in advertising for Trans, which is affiliated with Blue Ant, This is an addition to her job of designing and making hats. Magda describes her responsibilities as to “look sorted, go to clubs and wine bars and chat people up”(84). The purpose of the conversation was to “mention a client’s product, of course favorably”(84) and “attract attention of favorable sort”(84) while she is at it. The company’s form of non-advertising advertisement aims to arouse public attention to a pattern they’ve created and spread themselves. It seems that the work later comes to recognizing such patterns and seek the purpose behind them. To me, this responsibility ties back to Cayce’s job in detecting and examining symbols that impact people’s lives and behaviors. Also, Voytek is entering the advertisement world as he collects Sinclair ZX 81 personal computers. Once he revealed to Cayce that he is friends with Billy Prion, who owns a gallery so Voytek has “space to show ZX 81 project” (81) as part of his patronage business. The Internet, too, can help cyberspace advertising. For example, the leak of footage #135 becomes the target of many to decipher the code and meaning behind the fragmented clip. The circulation of this footage has been pretty widespread that the people whom Cayce meet with all confirm its existence and mystery. It turns out that they too, were members of the Blue Ant agency.

The concept of globalization is prominent throughout the first 120 pages we’ve read because each character introduced so far in the novel has come from a different background. Yet they all play a part in the industrial world because they each take on the responsibility according to their specialization. This includes the integration of global networking and technology as a form of communication between international economies. We have been introduced to a variety of workers who gets involved from different parts of the world that works in different branches under he Blue Ant agency. Whether it is directly under the company’s influence, or through online networking and cross-cultural contact, the point is to see the bounded connection and interaction that flows across the globe. Below is a list of the many other characters that contribute to the Gibson’s depicted world of globalization.

Cayce	New York	Investigate the maker of footage #135
Bigend	Belgium (graduated from Harvard)	Founder of Blue Ant
Parkaboy	Chicago	Researching footages and member of the online forum F:F:F
Darryl (Musashi)	Californian fluent in Japanese	Aids Parkaboy in translating kanji and discovers the watermark in footage #78
Boone Chu	Chinese-American	Hired by Bigend after his previous company that specialized in security failed. He assists Cayce in her investigation
Damien	Soviet Russia	Recording footages of the process in digging up and excavating sites of firefights of WWII in Russia

A Change of Perspective in Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily"

The shift from a first person plural to a first person singular point of view would change the tone of the story as well as the character development. Let’s take Tobe’s perspective for example. As Emily’s dutiful servant and connection to the outside world, he is seen as the only one that truly understands Emily’s behavior and actions. Unlike the townspeople’s perception of Emily as an eccentric recluse, Tobe would drastically change the sympathetic tone to one that is more understanding and argumentative. His initial step may be to rearrange the fabula in re-telling the story. Instead of describing the townspeople’s attendance in Emily’s funeral in the beginning, Tobe will first describe her past, when the impact of her father’s death and sweetheart’s desertion bereft her the love she deserved in life, and later be used to justify for her isolation and murder of Homer. In addition, he will be likely to include personal accounts of Emily’s life because the townspeople’s vision only offers their interpretations of her through the glimpse of her window, whereas Tope provides a solid, reliable account of the exact happenings inside the house. The change of perspective will be more subtle in the descriptions of her outside the house because those are true facts witnessed by the entire community. These moments may include her defiance in paying tax, determination to buy poison, and her affinity for Homer. With a different narration, Emily’s character is stretched and more round, enabling readers to formulate the reasons behind her transformation and the intentions of her actions. However, the ending scene with Homer’s corpse will be vague. Whether the murder is Emily’s strategy to preserve the love of her beloved one, Tobe leaves this ambiguity without a clarification. The shift somewhat still preserves Faulkner’s theme of mysterious death because the causes of Homer’s death remains unsolved. Tobe’s perspective simply proposes more facts, leaving readers a bit less room for imagination.

Nature Vs. Technology

In the poem, All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace, Brautigan introduces readers to the interaction between Mother Nature and industrial advances.

In the first stanza, Brautigan portrays a wistful image of a “cybernetic meadow”(3) that joins the forces of nature and technology to create a “mutually programming harmony”(5-6). This imagery provides a positive relationship between “mammals and computers”(4) because they can coexist in a healthy ecology, where neither may harm the other. Brautigan points out that in this way, inventions and innovations aren’t playing the role of “destruction”, as some critics say, but rather building upon the beauty of nature to give a meaning of “paradise”.

Similarly in the second stanza, the author continues with a “cybernetic forest” (11), illustrating the positive connotation of the pro-technology idea seen previously. To a further extent, Brautigan denotes “electronics” (12) as “flowers with spinning blossoms”(15-16) as if nature is refined through the cooperation and coercion of the technological factor. This new milieu “where deer stroll peacefully past computers”(13-14) gives a somewhat “dreamy and peaceful” setting. In fact, technology is another aspect of nature used to help people conform with society as a whole and seek what it has to offer.

The message in the last stanza is that nature and technology are clashing forces because one succeeds at the other’s expense. Given the creation of nature, humans are introduced to help enhance and improve upon this creation. As society develops due to the unlimited needs and desires of the human population, labor becomes an inescapable duty and responsibility. With people being put to work on industrial advances, the environment is getting physically damaged in a way that is irreversible. Brautigan sees such labor as a heavy burden on mankind and reminisces upon the early ages when people are “joined back to nature” (21) and “returned to our mammal brothers and sisters” (22). In this situation, “mammal” refers to the earlier characteristics of life that coexisted with the human population in nature. Such melancholic and desirous tone brings readers back to reality while showing doubt on the previously shaped utopia.

From my perspective, the anti-technology proposal seems more propelling because realistically, society is portrayed in this way. Since the introduction of new inventions in the industrial age, more labors are hired to further development in various companies. Consequently, many factors of nature, such as animals, have become extinct, and plants are striving to be preserved from pollutions of factories and other contaminants worldwide. In this matter, nature and technology are two extremes that when combined, collides with the concept of "harmony".