David Foster Wallace once said that:The language of images. . . maybe not threatens, but completely changes actual lived life. When you consider that my grandparents, by the time they got married and kissed, I think they had probably seen maybe a hundred kisses. They'd seen people kiss a hundred times. My parents, who grew up with mainstream Hollywood cinema, had seen thousands of kisses by the time they ever kissed. Before I kissed anyone I had seen tens of thousands of kisses. I know that the first time I kissed much of my thought was, “Am I doing it right? Am I doing it according to how I've seen it?”

A lot of the 80s and 90s critiques of postmodernity did have a point—our experience really is colored by media. Having seen a hundred movies about nuclear apocalypse, the entire time we’ll be looking over our shoulder for the camera, thinking: “Am I doing it right?”