Cult-ure

Ideas Can be Dangerous

Rian Hughes

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. Revealing how ideas are communicated through words, symbols and gestures, how such ideas gain cultural currency via the theory of the meme, 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.