Well, it’s that time again.

To waste our lives?

No! Time for today’s lesson — Oh, wait. Yes, actually, it is time to waste our lives.

As you are no doubt aware, the school year is coming to a close, and summer is about to begin. How great is this — how full of life, love and other warm, fuzzy things.

And yet, for some weird reason, I have this unnerving prediction that most of us will continue to do what we do best: absolutely nothing.

Facebook and the rest of that oh-so-flashy Internet will almost assuredly become our living tombs, just as they have been cages for us throughout the school year. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve looked around at my classmates to find Facebook open on their screens — sometimes even as a professor is calling them out for how pathetic it is.

The simple truth is that Facebook — and MySpace, Second Life or… shudder… Twitter — do not grow your mind. I’m not saying every professor and every class here at Iowa State does either, but at least some of them are trying.

But Facebook? All Facebook serves is a weird, out-of-touch, exhibitionist narcissism we have. Instead of going out to chat with friends or actually live our lives, we do things and immediately think of how we can express them online for all to see.

We have our nights out, sure. We have our real-life interactions. But how many of us, right after someone mutters something clever, say, “That’s going on Facebook!” How many of us take digital cameras with us everywhere we go so that we can hop onto the computer as soon as we get home to upload the pictures, so that others may envy us and comment on our lives?

In fact, Facebook has even brought a very strange shift in how we view others. Why call up an old friend or arrange to meet with them when you can watch their status updates? Not only that, but people are listed as “friends” regardless of how well one might know them. To remove a “friend” from this list is seen as high treason.

I know, because I recently excommunicated over 300 of my so-called “friends” and received a virtual lashing for it. But I dropped them anyway. Know why? Because I don’t care about some imagined, virtual, arbitrary list — and they’re not my friends in the first place. I don’t interact with these people, some I didn’t recognize, some I vehemently disagreed with on pivotal issues and some I had met only once.

If I meet you once while waiting in line at the cafe, we are not friends. We’re acquaintances. But people can’t seem to make that distinction anymore. People have become so wrapped up in this narcissistic world that they think you must be entirely one’s friend or entirely one’s enemy, and even “friends” are always trying to one-up the other.

For example, I recently overheard two men chatting in the UDCC.

“I have 489 friends,” said the first, his cocksure attitude almost palpable.

The other man responded quickly and sharply. “Oh yeah? Well I’ve got 604.”

Geez guys, why not just drop your drawers and get the real comparison over with?

Why do we do this? I absolutely cannot wrap my head around it. Why do we sit and let these images, these messages, infiltrate our minds and infest our brain tissue like a cancer? Why am I so certain that this summer — a time when the sun is high, the grass is green, the rivers are clear — people will sit and stew, hopping on Facebook chat to say to their friends, “There’s nothing to do.”

Nothing to do? You’re doing nothing by sitting at the computer. You’re doing nothing by letting your mouth droop open as drool trickles down your chin — it’s insanity.

Want to know how insane? In the Sociology class for which I am a teaching assistant, we recently played out the “un-TV experiment,” an assignment I would now like to give to you.

Simply sit in front of a TV, turned off, for 30 minutes. You cannot read, call anyone, text, use the computer, or any other interaction.

You must be isolated and focused on this emptiness. Reflect on your thoughts and see if that’s really what you want to do with your life.

And furthermore, I—

Oh. Wait. Hold on a second. I have two new notifications and three inbox messages.

 — Sophie Prell is a junior in pre-journalism and mass communication from Alta.