On Topic: We’ve come to depend on our screens

OK, it probably was a silly TV program, but we watched 'Selfie” up until it got canceled and then resurfaced on Hulu, mostly because its star, Karen Gillan, formerly of 'Doctor Who,” could be pretty funny, and what did we expect from a little half-hour sitcom anyway?

But as much as the Pygmalion-inspired stories were about the carryings-on of Gillan's ditsy, post-post-modern Lucy Ricardo, they also turned on our obsession with social media and life in our Internet age.

And it reflected a real fact - that today most of us rely a great deal on our screens.

We use them to communicate with friends, family and co-workers, and buy those folk presents; they direct our travels, book our flights, monitor our diets and tell us the temperature - our own as well as what's going on outside; they program our A/C, lock our doors, pay our bills and balance our checkbooks; they can plot our company's ROI, its liquidity and assets, and our employees' productivity.

They've become more than our BFFs. In very short order, lickety-split, they're now our partners, in life and business.

You think I'm exaggerating. Consider this:

According to comScore Inc., an Internet analyst company, one billion people worldwide watch more than 300 million hours of YouTube videos every day. In November alone, some 192 million Americans viewed 'online content videos via desktop computer,” it reported on its website last month.

Maybe not you or me, of course, but gangs of other people apparently are devoting an amazing amount of their lives sitting in front of a screen to see last night's 'The Daily Show,” 'Dancing With the Stars,” Beyoncé, cats behaving like, well, cats, and/or a comedy movie about an attempted assassination of Kim Jong Un.

Marketers know this. That's why advertisements can crowd our web searches like weeds in the backyard garden. (It confused me at first why promotions for Chevy cars continued to crop up wherever I went, even though I never ran a search for that make. Then I realized it was picking up on my name …

.)

Here's another example: We've come so far in believing in - trusting - what we can obtain at our fingertips, writers for the Washington Post and the New York Times talk about a 'misery index,” which extrapolates how people are feeling simply by counting Google searches.

Economist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz speculated in a Dec. 21 New York Times opinion column that, contrary to popular belief, depression doesn't spike during the holidays. He concluded this by calculating a decline in searches on Google over Christmas week.

That is, searches conducted for the words 'depression,” 'divorce,” 'suicide” and 'anxiety” went down as we approached Dec. 25, he wrote. ('Diet,” by the way, climbs as we move into January, he noted.)

Now, I certainly wouldn't question Stephens-Davidowitz's sums - he once worked for Google as a quantitative analyst. And, hey, I'm as much for seasonal cheer, new year's optimism and fresh starts as the next fellow.

So it makes sense that many of us get caught up in holiday festivities, Bing Crosby and the accompanying mirth.

But can we pin legitimate, scientific assumptions on the notion that an unhappy person who contemplates ending his or her life sits down to run a Google search on suicide?

I don't know. Seems like a lot to expect.

' Michael Chevy Castranova is enterprise editor and Sunday business editor of The Gazette. (319) 398-5873; michael.castranova@thegazette.com