CULT-URE: Ideas Can Be Dangerous

Culture is your local consensus reality; your clothing, cuisine and hairstyle, the music you listen to, the films you see; your values, ideas, beliefs and prejudices. Culture, unlike race, is not quite an inevitability of birth, but ultimately, in its choice of statements, an intellectual position. Today culture has a powerful new vector: the internet. Ideas–from a YouTube video to a viral marketing phenomenon or a fundamentalist religion–are traveling further and faster, and changing the cultural landscape like never before. In a new electronic democracy of ideas, cultural power is devolving to the creative individual. Amid our symbol-drenched existences, we desperately need a way of decoding the messages that bombard us. Written and designed by author and artist Rian Hughes, and sporting such design features as a faux-leather cover, die-cuts and tip-ins, Cult-ure is the culmination of a decade’s research into why and how we communicate. Revealing how ideas are transmitted through words, symbols and gestures, how such ideas gain cultural currency via the theory of the meme, this book provides a provocative exploration into media convergence within our digital age and an insider’s guide into the changing nature of communications, perceptions and identities; it is the twenty-first century’s answer to Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore’s seminal graphic collaboration The Medium Is the Massage (which punned on McLuhan’s famous motto “the medium is the message” to suggest the ways in which media directly tweaks our sensorium). Cult-ure is a guide to surviving the new media revolution.
Rian Hughes is an award-winning graphic designer, typographer and author. He studied graphic design at the London College of Printing before working for iD magazine and a number of record sleeve design companies. In 1994 he founded his own studio, Device. Hughes is described by Roger Sabin of Eye magazine as “one of the most successful and prolific British designer-illustrators of the past 20 years,” and by writer David Quantick as “a luminescent pop culture demon.”