In what he called the "Now this... " facet of American culture, sociologist Neil Postman put his finger on one of the trouble spots caused in part by television. Too regularly blamed for the country's ills, television has allowed us to feel comfortable digesting brief, discontinuous and wholly disconnected messages. That a report of a plane crash is sandwiched between a state house argument and a commercial for toothpaste rarely fazes us; we notice neither the intellectual nor emotional seams, for we are not meant to. Cognitively we are prepared to reconcile, blend, juxtapose, and thereby justify as truthful anything we see and hear, and abjure any logical causal connections.

To be trained daily on a diet of sound bites, sight bites, and quick bursts of data prepares us, unwit-tingly, to accept any order, shape or form of things, events or ideas. Our very modes of thinking and speaking have become so incomplete, disconnected, interrupted that no continuous, linked and logical line of reasoning can properly take place. Television and computer screens bring forth a new set of experiences, a new cognition and hence a new vocabulary, or a new rendering of the old vocabulary. In the presence of computer or television screens, things are actions, icons are actions, prompts are actions, news stories and events, even weather reports are actions, so it is only logical that nouns would be transformed into verbs. It makes perfect sense in a world that is screen deep, that conventional laws of grammar disappear and come to be replaced with language that depicts and describes felt sense, emotion, action, sensation.

Modern linguistic patterns bespeak an emphasis on senses and sensations (and hence sensationalism). As reasoning skills decline, sensual talents become emphasized. The power of language shifts from logic and argument development to what T.S. Eliot called the “jingle of the words,” and the expressions of sensations and feelings. The ubiquitous, “I was, like, oh, my God,” on the one hand says nothing at all. On the other hand, it is a clear-cut expression of or the felt sense of sensation; it represents or serves as the living embodiment of expression. As illogical as it may sound, the words “I was, like, oh, my God” become the sensation, (like the words “bam” and “zap” in comic books), a notion following directly from the impact of television on human cognition. What do you say in the face of viewing thousands of refugees on television? “I was, like, oh, my God” In truth, the abbreviation stands as a single key to be punched, a verbal icon representing sensation to be employed in a host of situations. Whatever the sensation, it’s just easier just to click on "I was like, oh my God."

Consider the use of the word, "like," in contemporary speech. It is strewn about in sentences almost as a tease to the listener that a simile is in the offing, but it rarely is. Whereas in one context emerging as vague expression, like, in another context, bespeaks a literal truth. In fact, television and computer screens are “like rendering” instruments. When the camera pans a refugee camp it is like I am there. When I go on the Internet and click on the Pushkin Museum it is like I am there as well. Screen deep and screen speak are nothing more than “like” experiences, for I am inevitably separated from the so-called “real” event or “real” place by the medium; all of our screen experiences are similes.

Another phrase heard repeatedly these days is the infamous, "You know." If it is not laziness in thinking, then “you know” may symbolize the “knowledge” assumed to be held by most people because of television and now, increasingly, the Internet. Others do know what I know and by extension think and feel. The essence of popular culture, after all, is that we all do know things, or recognize things because they are so, well, popular.

It appears that Americans have clicked on brief, entertaining, sensational, immediate, arousing, over examination, logic, coherence, reflective, reasoned. We imagine that what we possess is knowledge, but frequently it is merely a collection of bits of information. We work with computers where we seek to advance the notion that data, bytes, and web sites constitute the sources of knowledge. We admire quiz show contestants for their range of knowledge, but it isn't knowledge on display, it's data, info, and bytes; the contestants are practically living web sites.

Symbolizing our cognitive and cultural evolution, screen speak is captured in these words of Benjamin Barber: In substituting data for purpose and in believing that facts are surrogates for values, informationalism and its anarchic products actually imperil our identities, corrupt our democratic institutions and destabilize the economic foundations of our tenets of social justice.