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 a compulsory accident of birth, but 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 travelling 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. We will soon all have the means to create; we just have to decide whether it be art or bombs. In our symbol-drenched lives we desperately need a way of decoding the messages that bombard us.

Written and designed by Rian Hughes, CULT-URE is the culmination of a decade's research into why and how we communicate. CULT-URE provides a thought-provoking exploration into media convergence within our digital age and an insider's guide into the changing nature of communications, perceptions and identities. Set to become a cult publication for the digital generation, CULT-URE is the 21st century answer to Marshall McLuhan's seminal The Medium is the Message. CULT-URE is your thought-provoking guide to surviving the new media revolution, and a potent inoculation against infection by dangerous ideas.

Rian Hughes is an award-winning graphic designer, illustrator, comic artist, logo designer and typographer. He studied graphic design at the London College of Printing before working for an advertising agency, 'i-D' magazine and a series of record sleeve design companies. In 1994, he founded his own studio, Device, and has since worked with a wide range of international clients in publishing, advertising, music and fashion. He has also worked extensively for the British and American comic book industries, both as artist and designer. "One of the most successful and prolific British designer-illustrators of the past 20 years." - Roger Sabin, 'Eye' magazine