Not quite! This is making a statement about conditional probability, but you got the condition reversed: people who are depressed are more likely to be "engaged fully in the 'web' experience".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conditional_probability

To find out the chances that a heavy web user is depressed, you have to also consider the other things that can cause someone to use the web heavily. There's a really slick theorem for calculating this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayes_theorem

Wow... I have recently taken courses that taught Baye's Theorem, and even more recently read a long, well-written piece about how even qualified people often misinterpret statistics (the way your parent did which is not congruent with Baye's theorem), and yet I still interpreted the stat in the same, incorrect way.

That seems to be one of the major laments in Thinking, Fast and Slow (Kahneman). Us humans, even when we're 'ready for it', tend to be remarkably inflexible in adopting concepts which conflict with our basic or social intuitions...

> So basically people who are engaged fully in the "web" experience are depressed?

How could you read comments on HN, reddit and youtube and not be depressed?

Bingo. Or the news in general. If you're not depressed to some degree you're probably oblivious to what's going on in the world at large, or (possibly worse) don't care.

Or, you have an bias for optimism, like most people.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8rmi95pYL0

Or you just accept you alone can't solve the world problems and take the small steps you can.

For the record, I get angry at the world problems, not depressed.

My solution to this is to read them as sparingly as possible. What's the use of getting depressed over something you can't change? A smarter solution is to use as much of your time as possible to help yourself and others while only concerning yourself with issues you have influence over.