Much like a dual-purpose kitchen

utensil, media products manage

to do more than one thing for

the user. A newspaper, an online

guide to anal sex for

heterosexuals, or a television

news show all inform, entertain,

and identify.

Well, OK: So they all identify.

The 40ish woman reading a

dog-eared copy of The Rules in

the company cafeteria is a

middle-manager's secretary; the

house with The Wall Street

Journal in the driveway belongs

to your boss; the trio of

sloppily dressed middle-aged

men sitting in the coffeehouse

at midday, bantering edgily

about the latest issue of The

Nation, are academics without

tenure (or, in Los Angeles,

marginal screenwriters); and the

guy slouched in the corner,

turning the pages of a notebook

filled with cryptic, marginless

notes and densely drawn diagrams

with a stubby, hairy thumb -

well, that's Sidney Blumenthal.

Try not to catch his eye.

The identifying value of the

packaging can and does outweigh

our interest in the nutritional

value of the cookies. A certain

Suck contributor, upon moving to

a new town, began to read both

local daily newspapers -

concluding, after a few weeks,

that Newspaper A was in many ways superior

to Newspaper B. He approached

his roommates with his

conclusion, even somewhat

obsessively placing sample

stories side-by-side on the

elegant thriftstore furnishings

to complete the argument for

canceling one subscription and

starting another. Long pause.

And then the roommates in

question, college-educated young

corporate up-and-comers all -

bound, variously, for law school

and/or middle-management -

reacted with deep and ill-hidden

horror: The new guy had placed

his hand ... on the tabloid, - on the

lower-class paper - the paper

with the big picture on the

front and no fold in the middle.

We only mention this because we

have been looking into what's

lately been purported to be a

whole new mirror. If you believe

what spam has to say about spam

("Our Research shows this site

would be of interest to you"),

bulk emailers have built

machinery that focuses, with

laserlike intensity, on just the

wired consumers most likely to

buy their product - that is, on

the precise cultural set most

closely matched to the identity

that fits the packaging they've

created. Which neatly explains

why the entire Suck masthead was

hit with that message offering

to sell the recipient the very

latest in flakwear, full-body

bulletproof armor woven out of

Kevlar Threat Level II: Cross

us, know death.

We were also genuinely amazed at

the spammer who managed to

figure out that we had taken

three years of German in high

school; unfortunately, however,

the person who sent us that