Is the Internet Ruining Our Lives?

You know you live in a social media obsessed culture when someone's social media obsession can form the entire basis of a television show's premise. Karen Gillan's upcoming ABC show Selfie is an exaggerated look at what happens when you spend too much time on the Internet and it's unbearable true. Say what you want about social media giving us access to one another's lives in ways we've never been able to achieve before, but pretty soon we're all going to forget how to say hello to each other in real life. The first sneak peek at Selfie takes that to its logical extreme, showing Gillan's character struggling to remember the name of someone she walks past every day.

Hopefully none of us are that bad yet, but the fact that Selfie is taking a comedic look at what too much time on the Internet will do to your interpersonal relationships doesn't mean that it's not a lesson we shouldn't all learn. It's a culturally relevant update of Pygmalion, a play better known by the title of its musical adaptation My Fair Lady, in which Henry Higgins takes Eliza Doolittle under his wing and teaches her how to navigate the world of high society. This time around, instead of being a professor and phoneticist, Henry is a marketing guru trying to help Eliza Dooley become popular offline instead of just on.

With lessons that begin with just learning a co-worker's name, it's clear that ABC is mining that ridiculous premise for all of the laughs it can provide. Being able to laugh at Eliza will probably help take everyone's mind off the fact that there's a little Eliza Dooley in all of us. How many times have you been more comfortable expressing a thought on Twitter to hundreds of followers rather than offline to a close friend? How many times have you considered yourself close with someone because you're mutual friends on Facebook but you've never actually spoken to them on the phone? How many times has Netflix kept you inside your house when you promised you'd go out with your friends?

If you can answer yes to any or all of these questions, then you probably make up at least 95 percent of Americans. And if you can't answer yes to any of these questions, then you're probably lying.

Watch the sneak peek below.

Image: ABC