> “When you give people too much information, they instantly resort to pattern recognition." — Marshall McLuhan

Can anyone provide context for that? The only attributed source I can find for it is Joel Stein's 2019 "In Defense of Elitism: Why I'm Better Than You and You are Better Than Someone Who Didn't Buy This Book", which says it's from a 1968 Canadian TV show. I can't track down which one, much less find a recording of it.

Digging more, I found that Douglas Coupland's 2010 "Marshall McLuhan : you know nothing of my work!" (see https://archive.org/details/marshallmcluhany0000coup/page/n9... ) gives a slightly longer albeit unattributed quote:

"When you give people too much information, they instantly resort to pattern recognition to structure the experience. The work of the artist is to find patterns."

Yet the linked-to essay refers to "conspiracy theorizers" and "cult members", not "artists", which suggests that McLuhan had a different view on the topic.

A text search of McLuhan's 1964 "Understanding Media" finds "pattern recognition" used twice:

1) Now, however, in the electronic age, data classification yields to pattern recognition, the key phrase at IBM. When data move instantly, classification is too fragmentary. In order to cope with data at electric speed in typical situations of “information overload,” men resort to the study of configurations, like the sailor in Edgar Allan Poe’s Maelstrom. The drop-out situation in our schools at present has only begun to develop. The young student today grows up in an electrically configured world. It is a world not of wheels but of circuits, not of fragments but of integral patterns. The student today lives mythically and in depth. At school, however, he encounters a situation organized by means of classified information. The subjects are unrelated. They are visually conceived in terms of a blueprint. The student can find no possible means of involvement for himself, nor can he discover how the educational scene relates to the “mythic” world of electronically processed data and experience that he takes for granted. As one IBM executive puts it, “My children had lived several lifetimes compared to their grandparents when they began grade one.”

2) "We are entering the new age of education that is programmed for discovery rather than instruction. As the means of input increase, so does the need for insight or pattern recognition." - https://archive.org/details/understandingmed0000mars_s3z9/pa...

This further supports my interpetation that McLuhan sees pattern recognition as something useful, not as something for conspiracy theorizers and cult members.

This review of McLuhan's book, https://archive.org/details/everymansmcluhan0000gord/page/80... , seems to agree, saying "The book’s relentless blizzard of ideas illustrates one of its own key points: faced with information overload, the mind must resort to pattern recognition to achieve understanding."

Also, "connecting dots" brings to mind "ley lines" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ley_line), and Matt Parker's discovery that "Woolworths stores follow uncanny geometrical patterns." (http://web.archive.org/web/20100812112158/http://www.standup...). Alfred Watkins didn't need digital databases to connect those dots back in the 1920s.