In his book Popcultured, Steve Turner offers the following two ways to illustrate our fervent consumption of popular culture:

The filmmaker Paul Schrader has estimated that the average thirty-year old media savvy person today has seen around 35,000 hours of "audio-visual narrative," including everything from movies and soap operas to cartoons and YouTube clips. At the same age, that person's father [or mother] would have seen 20,000 hours, his grandfather 10,000 hours, and great-grandfather 2,500 hours. Schrader concludes: "We are inundated by narrative. We are swimming in storylines."

When Rolling Stone polled its readers, it found that they spend 11.5 hours a week listening to music, 7.9 hours watching TV, 4.4 hours social networking … and 2.8 hours playing video games. That adds up to over a day a week immersed in popular culture.