Sloth spam.

An author of the Bits blog on the Times' website discusses spam today, in particular the spammers' method of putting blatant insults in e-mail subject lines in order to get readers to click. He labels the phenomenon "Pride Spam" and hilariously and astutely points out that "Spammers have long riffed off the seven deadly sins to get us to open unsolicited messages. Lust (Paris Hilton spam), greed (Nigerian spam) and sloth (work-from-home spam) have all been thoroughly exploited."

It occurs to me that this insult-spam could been seen as a beautiful literalization of the way most mainsteram, bigtime, corporate advertising functions, albeit in more indirect ways -- i.e. by making the viewer/consumer feel insecure about his/her current identity in order to sell him/her the constituent objects of a new (or slightly different) identity. To put it more broadly, the corporate model of advertising seeks to conjure up some sensation of lack in its viewer in order to stimulate him/her to a consumer action that, the ad suggests however subtly, will fill this void or supplement this lack.

Now, given that predicate drawings, whether consciously or unconsciously, engage advertising culture at a number of levels -- in their employment of text and image; by the fact that they are computer-generated; in their use of tagline-esque declarative sentences; their bold assertions about the Way Things Are and the identity of their "spokesmodels"; by the fact that a number of them are printed onto objects that typically carry advertising (tee shirts and promotional tote bags); and in their uncanny tendency, once printed onto fashion commodities, to advertise themselves -- we might consider our own little sloth in the context of the "sloth spam" the Bits blogger discusses.

So in this context, what do we think the sloth drawing is doing? Is the sloth tee shirt just some kind of wearable "sloth spam" that makes you feel bad about yourself in order to sell you....itself??

Discuss!

In other news (and speaking of advertising), we were plugged! Old friend and neighbor Terry Brock surprised us with a whole entry devoted to the predicate, ink. blog on his own blog, "Dirt." Terry digs holes in the ground and finds things in them for a living... how cool is that?