Rob Walker is a great analyst of consumer culture; his "Consumed" column in the New York Times Magazine is always wonderful and his blog - Murketing - is almost too full of fascinating material about capitalism in America.
In a recent "Consumed," he wrote about QR codes, the new marks of the beast two-dimensional product-info symbols that are replacing the familiar UPCs. QR codes are currently less common in the U.S. than in Europe and Japan, but I can remember seeing them on electronics. The advantage over the old UPC is that
the new generation of code can handle more information because it is arranged in a dot-matrix style that communicates with a scanner both horizontally and vertically — as opposed to the one-dimensional, linear manner of regular bar codes.
This is a neat little transom into the future, I think. Among other gee-whizzes, the QR codes can be read by the cameras in properly-equipped cell phones. The column also mentions a Swiss consultancy that lets you generate your own QR codes for any text, URL, phone number, or SMS. The fun's endless. (Notice the increasing complexity of the dot matrices.)