The aim of CULTURE...

... is to get real, put our fingers into the wall socket, test the electricity and see what happens. Or, slightly less painfully, to take a deep breath of the prevailing air and see what it smells like. This isn't really the place for reviews of last night's Songs of Praise, or even to check out the latest album by Saint Matt, but is to engage with the dominant culture - or probably cultures - of today.

Get a Grip! - Phil Cansdale looks at two common assumptions Christians have about culture, and thinks about how we can engage with the media:

"Hello world, goodbye brain...!"
"Hold my drink while I get out my Bible..."

CULTURE - What you see is what you get?

'WYSIWYG' isn't just something that can be said about the computer monitor sitting in front of you. It can also be applied to our TV screens, or going to the cinema, or reading a book, in fact anything in the media and culture. What we watch, the books & magazines we read, the music we listen to etc all have an effect on the way we think, the way we live, and the way we are. We live in such a media saturated society that its inevitable that the media world which people inhabit for so much of their lives becomes a formative and significant influence on them.

Statistic after statistic seems to confirm this:

• There are more TVs than bathtubs in the UK - 38million people watch TV for between 2-3 hours a day
• We know all about the lives and thoughts of our fave soap star / pop star / sports star, but probably don't know the people living next door
• The average ten year old has seen 80,000 adverts, and big businesses spend billions of pounds on advertising, persuading us to buy into a lifestyle rather than a pair of trainers
• People seem more interested in voting for Big Brother than voting in elections. 50,000 people applied to be in Big Brother 2

So the media - and particularly TV - has become, for most of us, as much a part of our lives as the electricity that comes into our homes or the air we breathe.

The aim of CULTURE is to get real, put our fingers into the wall socket, test the electricity and see what happens. Or, slightly less painfully, to take a deep breath of the prevailing air and see what it smells like. This isn't really the place for reviews of last night's Songs of Praise, or even to check out the latest album by Saint Matt, but is to engage with the dominant culture - or probably cultures - of today.